My writing here

It's dress-down Friday, the perfect backdrop for reading my story Dress-down Friday, which has more stationery and workplace action, and which was published this week on The Pygmy Giant. Yay! You can read it here.

Today, my contribution to the Paraxis Library Wall has also gone live, along with a piece from my mum and submissions from various of my friends.

You can see the whole wall here and my contribution here. The editors had to chop off the last bit of my story because of its smutty content (it is a "companion piece" to Susie Loves Words, which appears in the Quickies: Short Stories For Adults anthology we launched this week - details on how to get your mitts on a copy on the blog soon!), so I'm publishing the story in its entirety here...

Microfiche by Sarah-Clare Conlon

You spend half your working day flicking through the dictionary; “the good book”. You edit report after boring report and pretend to look up specialised jargon alternatives in the thesaurus. You are actually poring over rude words, testing your encyclopaedic knowledge of swears against Roget. You usually win; the man has no sense of imagination. You couldn’t if you invented such a complicated cross-referencing system.

The challenge gives you an idea for an art project: one you’re certain you’d get funding for. The arts lot’d love it; they’d put on their special voices and everything. You’d catalogue all your favourite naughty phrases using library coding parameters, store them on microfiche and display the results on a light box in a darkened room that adds to the suggestive atmosphere. Accompanying this would be a series of Venn diagrams: male bits intersecting with female bits; the subset of shared bits including nipples, arses, hard, panting.