Judy's Jermyn
COMING JUNE 2025

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Brace yourself for some fun reading!
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"Listen the Board is Talking" and "Girl Crushes" PLUS the stories that inspired my short plays will be among the 20+ short reads featured in Mixed Shorts.
A complete reading experience with varied themes and genres!​​​​​​​
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Short Stories
Whenever someone read a short story I wrote, it was guaranteed they'd ask, "How do you know how many words for your story?"
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I suppose my best answer was, "When the story is finished, you count the words. And that would be the number you needed for your story." Now, however, I understand that there are more than one 'kind' of short story.
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One of my favorite sites, in the New York Times, , manages to lighten our hearts, with 100 word or less love stories.
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2,500 - 5,000 words
Definitions for the SHORT STORY
A story with a fully developed theme but significantly shorter and
less elaborate than a novel - Oxford Dictionary
An invented prose narrative shorter than a novel usually dealing with a few characters
and aiming at unity of effect and often concentrating on the creation of
mood rather than plot - Merriam-Webster
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500 - 2,500 words
Definition for a SHORT-SHORT STORY
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A very short piece of prose fiction, much more condensed than the average short story.
Contests are held for stories with as little as two words.
A well-known two-word story: Jesus wept.
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Many contests have asked for submissions for four-or five-word stories. Each has a subject, an object, a verb and maybe one description or refining notion.
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My favorites (authors unknown) include
a sad story:
We all die someday.
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and,
a horror story:
Just saw my reflection blink.
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There's not much that compare with the feeling you have when seeing your words in print
or hearing a recording of a poem you've written,
or watching the characters you've created on paper come alive on stage.
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That's magic.
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"Writing is the only thing, that, when I do it,
I don't feel I should be doing something else." - Gloria Steinem