Still Reading

A little overdue perhaps, but here is our annual look at which of our many stories attracted most readers on our website for 2022. Perhaps not surprisingly the most read story was the winner of the 2020/21 competition, but four stories from previous years round out the top five. It all goes to show, as if we needed reminding, that a good story is a good story whether it was written yesterday or a decade ago.

Despite not having the attraction of a short story competition in 2022, we were delighted to see that many of the stories from previous years continue to be read by our visitors.

Here’s the top five:

 1 Magic And The Art Of Thrift Store Shopping With Ma by Nick Trapani.

2 Another Van Gogh by Justice McPherson*

3. The Essay by Hugh Kellett*

4 Talia by Christi Nogle*

5 Blueprint For The End Of The World – Laura Duerr*

*Please note that the complete versions of these stories are available in the Askance short story collection Saltwater and Other Stories (available in print from Amazon)

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Winter 20/21 Short Story Prizewinners

The three prizewinning stories from are latest competition are now online, just follow the links:

Our winner was Magic And The Art Of Thrift Store Shopping With Ma by Nick Trapani.

Runners-up were The Hell Of It by David A Wimsett and A Tangled Web by Hugh Kellett.

Spend a little time with each of them and be sure to leave a comment for the authors. And keep an eye open for our new anthology Saltwater And Other Stories – you can register for an alert when it’s published.

Winter 2020/21 Short Story Competition Now Open

The Askance Winter Short Story Competition for 2020/21 is now open! As usual there’s no theme, and a generous word limit of 1500 to 5000 words. There’s a modest entry fee and prizes for the stories judged as the best three we receive.

Send us something old or something new, just make sure it’s one (or two!) of your best stories and you’ve polished it till it shines.

If your entries are anything close to the level we usually see in our contests, we’re going to thoroughly enjoy reading them. Judging is always difficult, and has become more difficult each year that we run our competition. We’ll read every story at least twice, and all about-to-be-rejected stories will be read again, just to make sure a quirky gem is not lost.

Check the full details on the competition page.

Winter 2020/21 Short Story Competition

The Askance Winter Short Story Competition for 2020/21 will open on October 1st. As usual there’s no theme, and a generous word limit of 1500 to 5000 words. There’s a modest entry fee and prizes for the stories judged as the best three we receive.

If your entries are anything close to the level we usually see in our contests, we’re going to thoroughly enjoy reading them. Judging is always difficult, and has become more difficult each year that we run our competition. We’ll read every story at least twice, and all about-to-be-rejected stories will be read again, just to make sure a quirky gem is not lost.

Check the full details on the competition page.

Winter Short Story 2020 Winners

Our short story competition is getting more difficult to judge every year. 2020 has been no exception, with some intense and beautiful writing, some of it very dark indeed, some light and whimsical. However, once the choice was made, our winner, Talia by Christi Nogle, became the natural champion, how could we have chosen any other? (Actually, quite easily, as you’ll see when you read our runners-up, Petite Marie by Tara Campbell and Another Van Gogh by Justice McPherson).

Talia felt like pure Americana, the images as brilliant as the sunshine the story swelters in, the characters as gritty and down-to-earth as a documentary. Writing from multiple points of view is always risky, a writer can so easily lose the reader’s attention, break the thread, wake the reader from that “vivid and continuous dream”. Not so with Talia, the multiple POV works beautifully, a mark of the author’s skill.

Petite Marie and Another Van Gogh ran Christi Nogle close. Both were original, surprising, entertaining, well worth the second and subsequent reads.

We hope you enjoy them all.

Dreams photo by Benjamin Sow via Unsplash

Winter Short Story Competition 2019/20 Finalists

What makes a good story? Something different for every one of us, but after reading many stories over the years, one point suddenly shone out from our latest call, our Winter Short Story competition: a good story often improves with a second read, even a third or fourth. Last year’s winners all satisfied that criteria too.

Our short-listed stories this year are:

Another Van Gogh
Invisible – A Love Story
Killing Melissa
More Of A Wednesday Girl
Petite Marie
Talia
The Blue Room
The Last Post
The Orchard
Westbound On A Tank Of Desperate Hope
Who Causes Thunder
Why We Never Did Hamlet

For all writers whose story is not on our list, please remember that the difference between being there and not is often paper-thin. On another day, in another place your story could have been there.

To all our writers, a huge thank-you for submitting your work to Askance.

Most Read?

It is tempting to hope that visits to our story pages equate to visitors reading the stories. It would be wonderful to think that our winner from last year, Rachael Cudlitz, had nearly 700 readers for her story, not just 700 page visits. All our writers certainly deserve that audience and more.

What’s top of our list and what’s not is mainly a function of who promotes their stories most on social media, we try to advance the writing of all our authors. So, which were the most visited stories in 2019?

1. Saltwater by Rachael Cudlitz

2. The Essay by Hugh Kellett

3. Blueprint For The End Of The World by Laura Duerr

4. The Attraction Of Magnets by Grace Keating

5. Paper Leaves by Antonia Maxwell

Find more on our Stories page.

Why not choose your favourite, then tell the world by posting a link on your social media?

Pushcart Nomination

Here’s a first for Askance: this week we nominated one of our short stories for The Pushcart Prize. What have we chosen? Our Winter Short Story winning entry Saltwater by Rachael Cudlitz.

When a story stays with you over the months and is just as readable today as the first time we saw it, then the very least we can do is try and bring it to the attention of a wider audience. The Pushcart Prize is an extremely crowded field, the best there is from small presses across the world, but in our opinion Saltwater belongs with the best.

To find out more about the Pushcart Prize click the link.

It seemed like the perfect moment to do this, not only are nominations open this month and next, but the Askance Winter Short Story competition opens again on November 1st. Will we have another potential Pushcart nominee next year?

Casa Rosa: first reactions

We’re just hearing the first reader reactions to DJ Wiseman’s Casa Rosa. From Vancouver, BC, JG comments “so tender, such a good read, congratulations”; in Maryland, USA, AE “read the whole thing in four sessions, literally couldn’t put it down, I was walking around the house with it in my hand. Wonderful”; in Surrey, BC, TB was “saving this for my holiday, but devoured it in two days.”

Have you read Casa Rosa yet? Leave a comment below if you have.

Exciting Times

These are exciting times! Hot on the heels of the results of our Winter Short Story competition, we’re pleased to announce the first of three planned publications for 2019.

We think you are going to love Casa Rosa, a new novel from DJ Wiseman. It’s set on the Pacific coast of  central America, and is driven by rumours of crime and questions of parentage, themes familiar to readers of the author’s previous novels.

See more details here and take advantage of special pricing for orders placed prior to publication on 27th March.