Podcast
SHOTS - Ultra short stories podcast
Literature is time consuming, and there's so little left. So, here are the shortest stories ever. Shorter even than the classic palm-of-the-hand stories by Yasunari Kawabata. Furthermore, I don't write and narrate the SHOTS - Ultra short stories podcast in any autobiographical fashion, which allows for anything to happen that your heart may desire. You must be able to listen, of course...
Accompanied musically by Jeroen van Veen...
How lucky can an author get... Pianist, arranger and producer Jeroen van Veen, known for his performances of (a.o.) Canto Ostinato by Simeon ten Holt, contributed importless to the literary podcast SHOTS. He played and recorded an all-new version of the etude for piano opus 39: No. 2 in A mineur by Sergej Rachmaninov, thus creating the peerless background music. I'm extremely happy with this unique signature, because this soundscape allows the stories to emerge in a better way.
...and edited/translated by Paul Vincent
More luck: English literary translator Paul Vincent has been helping me with my stories for many years. He has translated many stories in this podcast from the Dutch origials, and edited the stories that I've written in English myself. I'm satisfied that my English is sufficient for a lot of fluent use of the English language, just enough to know that I need someone as talented as Paul Vincent to migrate the 'feel' of the original version, the 'feel' of my stories.
Listen to the SHOTS podcast on:
The English version of my SHOTS podcast episodes will be appearing starting December 2022. You can click below on one of the buttons or you can type the title in your podcast app: SHOTS - Ultra short stories podcast. If you don't have a podcast app, choose YouTube or Zencastr.
About the origins of these stories
The finest description, to me, is this quote from Nick Cave in the film 20,000 Days on Earth: 'Sometimes this idea can be the smallest thing in the world. A little flame that you hunch over and cap with your hand and pray it will not be extinguished by all the storm that howls about it.' This is entirely accurate: every story has emerged spontaneously and was 'noted' immediately. Unlike writing-with-a-plan, the stories of the SHOTS podcast came into existence all of a sudden, without a premeditated purpose and without intensive rewriting afterwards. Therefore I call the stories Impromptus myself. An impromptu is something that—so says the dictionary—was made without preparation, offhand, and usually a piece of music. This unexpectedness is what appeals to me, as a writer, in particular, in these times dominated by ratio an premeditation.
Episodes
Episode 1: the stories Tank and Circus
Episode 2: the stories Officer and Nettles