This is more of a brag than a book review, as I have a story in this new comedy short story anthology from Farrago Books and I’ll tell you a bit more about how I came to write it, in a minute.
All about the anthology
The contents are as follows, with the first 3 being invited extras and the other 12 being the shortlist for the CWIP short story prize 2022/23:
The Art of Genital Persuasion by Kathy Lette — the shortest story in the book, featuring a penis-phobic heterosexual woman who has to act as a judge for nude male theatre performers
Fake It Till You Hate It by Sadia Azmat — a marketing executive develops a conscience
Double Date by Lucy Vine — a sweet rom-com with a delightfully vain dog, that had me genuinely laughing out loud. Cleverly written to upend your expectations several times
Poets Rise Again by Josie Long — two friends from modest beginnings form a business plan to help rich people shift some of the burden of their financial guilt
Sorry, Delivery by Paula Lennon — the CWIP winning story in which a wise-cracking delivery driver gets tangled up in murder
Unbound by Jean Ende — the bittersweet tale of an elderly aunt’s last hurrah, set in New York
Jenny Bean, Calamity Queen by Julia Wood — a disaster-prone woman organises an 80s themed party for her 50th
You Can’t Get There From Here by JY Saville (that’s me, folks) — a hapless birdwatcher can’t let his wife find out he’s not really at a lab technicians’ conference at the other end of the country
Glue by Clare Shaw — warmly funny tale of a geeky history teacher building up the courage to do things her mum won’t approve of. I like that it didn’t take the obvious path, and who can resist such a committed Rick Astley fan?
Care Home Capers by Wendy Hood — an endearingly grumpy posse of care home residents plot revenge on a tuneless children’s choir
Hapless by R Malik — quirky fairytale of a man who befriends a pig, in a rural village one unguarded cabbage away from anarchy. It was a nice touch to check in with how the pig is feeling about events, now and then
Ways With Mince by Kathryn Simmonds — a darkly funny letter of apology to a woman’s mother-in-law
Go Your Own Way by Kimberley Adams — a Geordie teen and her Nana conspire to get her out of work experience at a funeral parlour
Nothing Compared to You by Annemarie Cancienne — the bittersweet tale of a friendship that died
Shopping for England by Kim Clayden — Tilly is representing her country in a competitive shopping race
The stand-out ones for me were Glue, Double Date and Hapless.
I’m probably not supposed to criticise, since I’m part of it, but I do wish they hadn’t written ‘15 new laugh out loud stories’ on the front cover because they’re not all laugh out loud and nor are they meant to be. In fact the back cover says ‘Deadpan, farcical, laugh-out-loud or quirky…’ but it’s the front cover that gets someone to pick the book up and sets their expectations.
Humour comes in many forms and yes there are lines in this book that will make you snort your tea, but there are also wry observations, situations that will make you smile with recognition, characters that will brighten your day. With a sitcom — particularly one recorded with an audience — you need the laughs to come thick and fast and you need them to be audible. With a short story or novel, that expectation isn’t there. You can be subtler, especially if badged as ‘witty’ rather than ‘hilarious’ women. There are entire stories where the wildest response is likely to be a big grin, and that’s fine.
Now let’s talk about me
I’m not sure what the response to You Can’t Get There From Here will be but I did try and use sitcom techniques I’d learnt in James Cary’s Writing Your Sitcom course to plan the pacing and escalation. In fact it was the success of this story, which I reckoned it would take me about half an hour to read aloud, in the CWIP prize that prompted me to start my audio sitcom Lee-Ann’s Spare Fridays, but that’s another story. It was great fun to write.
I had noted that Comedy Women in Print were holding a short story prize for the first time, and I had written the deadline on my calendar, but with a month to go I had no ideas whatsoever. Then I wrote a blog post about the story potential of thwarted plans, prompted by cancellations and rearrangements due to the Queen’s sudden death. Later that day I wrote in my big purple notebook, ‘is there scope for humour in a thwarted plans story?’
Evidently there was.
I wrote 5 ideas down, the second of which was ‘I like the idea of a continually thwarted, meandering journey. A bit Planes, Trains and Automobiles’. The fifth was ‘the classic Nobody Will Ever Find Out scenario. Supposed to be in Brighton for a conference, have in fact gone fishing in Wales, conference hotel burns down’. Then there’s a note suggesting I combine ideas two and five, and there you have it.
Other than changing fishing to birdwatching and Wales to the Lake District, the short paragraph below that note outlining the story would still happily serve as a synopsis of its published form. I probably spent more time, and certainly more space in the notebook, working out timings, distances, train availability… What time would Ian have to ring his wife Patty, to have missed his chance to get a train before lunch? What if I make it a Sunday? What if I make Patty have to set off from this side of Leeds instead of that side? What time is Helen’s party, that Ian is now available to attend?
At some point when I was a child my dad was the senior lab technician in charge of an electron microscope in a textile testing lab at a polytechnic. I remember him going to Manchester and London to join other lab technicians admiring displays of shiny new kit, and he brought me back cloth bags (long before they were trendy), pens and random other exhibitors’ paraphernalia. Whether these were conferences or just exhibitions, I couldn’t say.
Working as a non-academic in a UK university for many years, I know that lab technicians in higher education have organised and professionalised over the intervening years, and I’m quite sure there are a whole host of conferences available to them these days. Having avoided the conference dinner and most networking opportunities at a conference myself recently, I know they’re not suited to everyone. Ian consequently has a bit of my dad in him, as well as a bit of me, but mostly he’s himself.
‘I’ll pick you up.’
He was about to ask where, and why, and some more of the questions pinging around his head but a sheep wandered closer and opened its mouth as though about to bleat. Ian cut the connection. The battery symbol flashed red in the middle of the screen twice, then the screen went black. He hadn’t packed a charger, hadn’t been planning on using his phone much and preferred to travel light. The sheep ambled off up the fell in silence.
You Can’t Get There From Here by JY Saville
The Book of Witty Women is out in paperback and e-book on April 25th. Available at all the usual places like Hive, Waterstones or Bookshop.org, or even the massive online one we don’t talk about but loads of people shop at.