How to write a joke...

...or a story. This is how jokes work: you introduce a concept that's a bit off-centre: "Waiter, bring me a crocodile sandwich!" Then, when people are smiling a little at the oddness of this, you turn it around and twist it again: "And make it snappy!" Like a moebius strip, so it's turning in on itself and going around and around.
Here's another: "How many Freudians does it take to change a lightbulb?" Odd thought: a bunch of bearded and bespectacled psychoanalists clustered around changing the lightbulb. "Two, one to screw in the lightbulb, the other to hold the penis - I mean, ladder." Lightbulb jokes always rely on odd electricians: "...surrealists?" "A fish!" "...feminists?" "Do you think that's funny?"
All jokes use this basic formula. Shaggy-dog jokes just stretch out the first part for a loooong time. My old chief sub Jim Carwood used to tell one that involved a man leaving his house, bumping into a lamppost, making an insurance claim, putting the money on a scratchcard, winning a million, going into a pub, being picked up by an incredibly beautiful Indian woman, taking her home and going to bed with her and in the morning waking up and saying "You've got a spot on your forehead and scratching it - and he won another million! And the punchline: she says to him, "You're a lucky man!"
Stories use the same basic idea: your hero is put into a situation where he's thrown off centre - as in Claire Keegan's superb Foster, where the child of an all-over-the-place family is brought to stay for the summer with her mother's sister and brother-in-law. Then further off course: in Foster, the child's father drives off with her case of clothes, and the aunt and uncle dress her in boy's clothes and put her to sleep in a boy's room, but there's no boy in the house. Gradually, as the story opens out, things get odder, and yet reveal themselves, until with the twist at the end, in the last line - but I won't spoil the pleasure of reading it for you.

 Lucille Redmond's ebook, Love, gripping dark and funny stories of love and revolution, is available on Amazon and iTunes

Money

Money as the only value seems to be coming into its own. Every time it's suggested that terrified people in mortgage arrears should get help, some little fuck is going to start whinging "But what about me, I paid four hundred grand for this shoebox. I was thrifty. I didn't spend. Why should they be helped?"
Every time some new law or treaty or decision is mooted, every time people look at a work of art, it's "But how much will it cost?"
Kids, it's not all about money. There are other values that are more valuable, more vital, more immortal, more decent.
Money's important, but it's not the thing we should be looking to to decide our moral decisions.
Which thought comes to me from a selfish place; I've been wandering around the gaff distributing flyers for an ebook of short stories I've published on Amazon and iTunes.
To my surprise, Dublin's more elegant areas are giving up the old Irish custom of having boards in shops and cafes where local theatrical groups and plumbers and dog-walkers could bestrew their flyers and cards and leaflets. Probably doesn't bring in any business.
Even the supermarkets, where you used to be able to snaffle up an ad for guitar lessons or Swedish massage as you stood in the queue, have banished the leaflet board to some lonely pillar.
One comfort: if you do find a cafe with flyers and leaflets, it's going to be an arty place where other writers and painters hang out, gazing thoughtfully at their notebooks as they sickle off an Americano and a slice of lemon drizzle cake.
Hope is not lost, though, even in the non-arts-cafe life; there are still places that will kindly take a flyer and post it up; my heartfelt thanks to Laser DVDs and Books Upstairs and Grogan's and Accent cafe, and the many other places who have stuck a flyer up to lure those eager to read surreal stories that will haunt your dreams and nightmares through the years.

An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

Faber and Faber
Out of Africa?
Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah won the Guardian First Book award with these stunning short stories.
A troubled land
In one story, the narrator’s aunt boasts that her daughter sent her a present of Z$250 billion - equivalent to £200 with Zimbabwe’s raging inflation.
And the words?
Lovely spare stuff, simple sentences piled on each other, making stories that take your heart out.
What kind of stories?
In the same story, a family is waiting for ‘something nice from London’ - the body of their son. And if he doesn’t turn up soon they’re going to go broke, because a host of hungry relatives are staying and feasting until they can bury him.
Gloomy!
Like a lot of stories by the young, these are in no way cheery. But they’re brilliant. In one, the widow of a hero of the revolution attends his funeral - they’re burying a sack of earth, for political reasons.
Political?
The Party insists he be buried in the equivalent of the Republican Plot in Glasnevin; the family that he be buried in his home place. All very Soldiers of Destiny.
I feel almost at home
In another story, ‘Harare’s finest blackmailers’ - traffic cops - extract ‘fines’ from hapless motorists. In another, a man dances himself to death.
Eee! Too sad!
Oddly, not. The stories are so fascinating, the characters so entrancing, that their dark subjects don’t infect you. Even while you’re watching a successful young couple scammed by a would-be illegal emigrant, you’re laughing.
And the writer?
Lawyer with degrees from Graz, Cambridge and Zimbabwe Universities, works in Geneva for a body that gives developing companies legal aid on international trade law. Currently working on her first novel, The Book of Memory.
A buy, you say?
An antidote to our own sorry-for-ourselfness. And a fine work from a new voice. A buy.

20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

Gollancz €11.95

JOE HILL'S first novel, Heart-Shaped Box - about a bad-boy rock star who buys a ghost on the internet - was built around a plot hole the size of San Andreas Fault, but was so exuberant, funny and scary that several editions sold out before publication.
The first issue of his comic Locke & Key sold out in one day.
The stories in 20th Century Ghosts were the first book published by a writer who happens to be the son of Stephen King, but kept that quiet until outed by perceptive readers.
The stories are gripping - oh yes. They lack the cruelty of true horror, and they have the sweetness that is Hill's most notable asset.
(His father, incidentally, used to have a dog called Good Boy. When children petted it and said "Good boy!" he would reel back and say: "You're clever! How did you know my dog's name?")
In one story here, a film-obsessed ghost terrifies cinemagoers by chatting to them about the movie, then replaying her death.
In another, dead children coach a kidnap victim on how he should kill their murderer.
In a charming fantasy, a man remembers his best friend, an inflatable boy who lived in terror of the narrator's evil father and his savage pit bull.
Irresistible stories.