Highly Irregular Newsletter #34 Oct 2025

FUEL ebook, physics collides with fairy tales, warm up your writing muscle, and more cheering and celebration, and musings on the gift economy

Listen to me reading this post

Hello from windy Manchester!

It’s feeling very autumnal here, and I am a fan of darker, cosy evenings - although when the clocks go back in a few weeks I will get out my trusty SAD lamp because that much darkness is a little much for me. What have I been up to this month? Well, the first exciting news is that on October 1st I published the ebook version of the FUEL anthology of prize-winning flash fictions raising funds to fight fuel poverty!

I put together and published the print book in Feb 2023 with 75 flash fictions from writers and competitions around the world - not just to raise money for fuel poverty charities, but also to explode the myth that there’s one way or “formula” for winning a flash fiction competition and pass on permission to everyone to, yes, write what you want in the way you want to write it! I’ve had such wonderful feedback on the book. Hannah M left a review saying:

“This is, quite simply, a jaw-dropping collection. The concept works so well that I would defy anyone - even flash fiction sceptics (if such a person exists!) - not to enjoy it. The breadth and the depth of the writing leaves you drawing breath and reaching for more.”

With the ebook, I wanted to add a little something extra - so in addition to the 75 flash stories in the print book, there are 12 bonus first-prize-winning flash stories from 12 new writers and competitions worldwide - making this an even more surprising, diverse and entertaining collection. I included an Index of First Lines in the print book to demonstrate that there are at least 87 different ways to start a story, which I’ve been told is enormously useful!

The print book raised over £4000 for our four chosen charities - winter is coming here in the UK, many people are still finding it hard to heat their homes and their food, so grab yourself a great read and help these charities help people at the same time! For the moment, the ebook (price £4.99, format EPUB) is only available here, so we can make as much as possible for charity: https://www.fuelflash.net/product/fuel-ebook-with-12-bonus-stories/ Please spread the word!

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Upcoming Zoom Workshops

We had a great time exploring word-swerving at last month’s workshop. This month I’m once again trying something BRAND NEW. Some of you may have been at my Fairy Tales and Crime Mashup workshop in March. This time we’re exploring what happens When Physics and Fairy Tales Collide. If the word “physics” thrills you, get yourself a ticket. If it fills you with school-related traumatic flashbacks, then this is also definitely for you, because we will be getting highly playful and having phun with phabulous physics words and concepts in many weird and wonderful ways - and you won’t be tested on any of it!

I had thought that Physics and Fairy Tales were worlds apart, but as I do research to put this 2-hour workshop together, just as with Fairy Tales and Crime I’m finding all sorts of areas of overlap. We’ll be looking at how other writers have taken inspiration from the world of physics, too. Do come and join me on Mon Oct 20th 7-9pm!! More details and tickets here: https://app.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/1846846

And a quick heads-up that in November I thought I’d run another 1-hour Writing Muscle Workout - where we do three writing exercises one after the other to get your writing muscle warm and flexible! That will be on Sunday Nov 9th, 7-8pm, more details and tickets here: https://www.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/1889162

As with all my workshops, what you write is just for you, there’s no sharing of work, and you are very welcome to have your camera off if it’s more comfortable. There are concession, free and pay-what-you-can places available (I discuss this more in Permission Corner below) - and if you can’t make it live, all ticket-holders get the link to the recording afterwards. More details and booking for both workshops here, hope to see you there! https://www.tickettailor.com/events/taniahershman/ (Unbox subscribers will receive your discount code for both workshops in the next post on Oct 15th).

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The Palace of Cheering and Celebration

I inaugurated this new section of the newsletter last month, and I’m very much enjoying all the cheering! This month we’re celebrating Jess Richards, who, when I asked for people to let me know about writing news related to any of my Unbox posts or workshops, wrote to say: “The following were written during / just after your wonderful workshops. Many of the other things I’ve written during your workshops are part of my two main ongoing projects (Unnamed Creatures - fiction - and a poetry collection, Everything’s Become Ghost) so aren’t published/submitted just yet.”

A Bird from Everywhere (poem) was longlisted for the Mslexia Women’s Poetry Competition 2025 and shortlisted for the poetry category of the Bridport Prize 2025

· The Opposite of Helplessness (flash fiction / prose poem) was shortlisted for the flash fiction category of the Bridport Prize 2025

· A Large Pot, Used for Cooking Very Slowly (flash fiction) was longlisted in the Bath Flash Fiction Awards 2024

· A Message - (poem/flash-thing) to be published in the latest Linen Press Anthology - Look Away Now, 2025

Four enormous cheers for Jess and her writing news! She told me she sent me the email to also let me know that “your writing exercises, readings, and ideas are FAB and lead to REAL texts and aren’t just strange virtual moments”. Thank you, Jess, that brings me much joy. If you have any writing news related to something I might have sparked in my workshops and writing exercises/prompts here, please don’t be shy - drop me a line and let us celebrate you!

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Permission Corner

I was visiting a friend last weekend, and was telling them about how much I am enjoying running my own Unbox Your Words Zoom workshops instead of teaching for other organisations. I said that even though I offer an unlimited number of free, concessionary and pay-what-you-can places, I am still earning more per workshop than I would if I was teaching for someone else. My friend found this very surprising and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. I decided to use this month’s Permission Corner to explore it further.

I realised that this ties in with a book I’ve been reading as research for the novel I am writing. In this novel, I am creating an alternative version of our society, and although it was originally based around a society where solo people like me are the “norm” and there is no longer any concept of marriage or even couples, I’ve understood as I have been writing it that this could lead to other, major changes in the way a society and communities operate. For example, I’ve been looking at different economic theories (I do LOVE doing research), and am currently reading a book published in 2017 called “Women and the Gift Economy: A Radically Different Worldview Is Possible”, edited by Genevieve Vaughan.

The book is a collection of essays by a number of writers with the aim to “bring forward the gift paradigm as an approach to liberate us from the worldview of the market that is destroying life on the planet”. I really like this idea, it speaks to me a great deal. (You may have already heard of it from Lewis Hyde’s book, ‘The Gift’, published in 1983.) As well as gently slipping gift-giving into my novel, I believe that it is what I’m attempting to do in regards to my writing and teaching.

I wrote here in March about why I was creating a way for anyone to get hold of a “full subscription” here on Substack for free, if paying would be a struggle. I said then that: “Having more & more subscribers and more & more revenue is not my personal definition of success. This is not the measure I choose of whether what I am doing has value. I’m here for connection, for community, for conversations. I’m here to be entertaining and, I hope, useful.”

As I said then, it’s incredibly important for me that anyone who wants to can access both my Unbox Your Words writing prompts/exercises here - and my Zoom workshops. I don’t want the price to ever be an issue. Is it then counter-intuitive that I am in fact earning more by giving places away for free? Is it only counter to the intuition shaped by capitalism’s concept of “value”?

This reminded me of what I’ve also been reading around the idea of “The Commons”, where a society is more communal and community-focused. A paper by Garrett Hardin called “The Tragedy of the Commons”, published in 1968, claimed that “freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” because if given free rein humans would selfishly just take what they needed with no thought of anyone else. But in fact, as an article entitled “The Miracle of the Commons” in Aeon magazine explained:

Even before Hardin’s ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was published, however, political scientist Elinor Ostrom had proven him wrong. While Hardin speculated that the tragedy of the commons could be avoided only through total privatisation or total government control, Ostrom had witnessed groundwater users near her native Los Angeles hammer out a system for sharing their coveted resource. Over the next several decades, as a professor at Indiana University Bloomington, she studied collaborative management systems developed by cattle herders in Switzerland, forest dwellers in Japan, and irrigators in the Philippines. These communities had found ways of both preserving a shared resource – pasture, trees, water – and providing their members with a living. Some had been deftly avoiding the tragedy of the commons for centuries; Ostrom was simply one of the first scientists to pay close attention to their traditions, and analyse how and why they worked.

I love this! And I think that what has happened here with my Zoom workshop ticket sales demonstrates this so beautifully. You and I might have thought that everybody would naturally go for the free places, and if Garrett Hardin’s worldview was right, that was what would have happened, and I would not earn anything at all in capitalist terms. But that’s not what happens. What I’m seeing firsthand is people ordering places across all price options, from free to full-price.

Where do permission and gift-giving come in here? It’s not that I am giving people a “gift” of a free ticket, it’s that I think perhaps I am gifting permission through the choice I am offering for people to take according to their need and give according to their ability. In her introduction to “Women and the Gift Economy”, Genevieve Vaughan says: “In gift giving, one gives to satisfy the need of another and the creativity of the receiver in using the gifts is as important as the creativity of the giver.” And it is very much not that if you opt for a free place, you are not giving me anything. On the contrary! Capitalism might not recognise it, but the enormous gift all of you are giving me when you sign up for one of my workshops or for a full subscription here is that you are giving me a huge confidence boost that what I am creating has value - a value completely independent of anything monetary - and you give me permission to keep doing it and doing it in my own way. Thank you for that gift, it really means the world.

I am still working this out in my head so I would love to hear your thoughts on it!

Tania x

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If you like what I’m up to here and want to show your appreciation, there are all sorts of ways to do that, such as “liking” this post and leaving a comment. If you’d like to slip something into my Tip Jar, click the button below. Thank you!

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