Andrew Roe

One of our pre-kids rituals was listening to NPR’s Weekend Edition. Not so much anymore.

So I didn’t hear about NPR’s summer writing contest until I saw mention of it over at The Elegant Variation this morning.

Details here.

It’s called Three-Minute Fiction (stories should be 500-600 words), and the judge is James Wood, literary critic for The New Yorker and author of How Fiction Works.

Mr. Wood will select stories throughout the summer and read them on the air. Then a winner will be announced in late July.

I just realized there’s a PDF of my story “What I’m About to Do Now,” which was published in Salt Flats Annual a few years ago. It’s also the title story of my short story collection.

So: here it is.

Two new sites to recommend…

1. Wordbirds

Do you like to make up words? Liesl Schillinger, who regularly reviews books for The New York Times, does. She “mints” new words, one a day, which is damn impressive.

Here’s a favorite recent entry for “parking spaced”:

V. (past tense) par-king-spayst To have forgotten where you parked your car. Usage: When Kara left the mall with her kids after spending the afternoon eating lunch and shopping, she completely parking spaced. It took her twenty minutes to figure out which lot she’d left the Subaru in.

(Yes, we have a Subaru.)

2. Engrish.com

This one got sent around at work, and it’s definitely worth a look.

Here’s how the site describes Engrish:

“Engrish can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design.”

That’s what this is. I guess I’m officially blogging.

Also: I keep writing stuff for the blog and then forget to post. I’ll try to do better. Promise.