Fictional Café Opens Submissions for Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, and PoetryDeadline: RollingThe Fictional Café, entering its tenth year, welcomes new boundary-breaking short stories, flash fiction, novel excerpts, poetry, creative nonfiction, and works in the visual and audio arts.A thousand Coffee Club members in 70 countries read our highly original ‘zine. We welcome all genres.Your work must be tasteful, original, and well written. We look...

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Never look at a reference book while doing a first draft. (A suggestion, if you'd question.)You want to write a story? Fine. Put away your dictionary, your encyclopaedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule....

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 Crime?It's just like escaping from within the boundaries of moral restraints. The deviation from this moral factor doesn't necessarily denote aggressiveness or some dark manifestation; crime can always be innocent—especially if there is a psycho out there who doesn't hear the whispers of composure. We ourselves hear these whispers—all of us, except we are like them, the criminals, the psyschopaths, the bloody highlifes...

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IMPERFECTION REMAINS AN INHERENT trait of man, and it reflects in diverse areas of his interest. Sometimes it's realised through a personal perspective, sometimes through some outsider's assessment. In many cases, what a certain outsider tag perfect is condemned by another. And one is left questioning the real nature of their results.     You stumble on a story idea and begin to piece things...

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by Elisha OluyemiImperfection remains an inherent trait of man, and it reflects in diverse areas of his interest. Sometimes it's realised through a personal perspective, sometimes through some outsider's assessment. In many cases, what a certain outsider tag perfect is condemned by another. And one is left questioning the real nature of their results.You stumble on a story idea and begin to piece things together....

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