To celebrate the shortest day of the year down under (July 21st) the New Zealand Aotearoa Chapter of 26 completed a short short story project called Page 26, Line 26 – an idea conceived by NZ 26-ers Lindsey Dawson and Sue Heggie.
Page 26, Line 26 asked New Zealand writers from 26 to create a 260 word story in 26 days. Each writer was randomly assigned a sentence taken from a book of fiction or non-fiction chosen by another writer in the group. The brief was to then use as their starting point the 26th line from the 26th page of their assigned book. The only rule was that each 260-word story must begin with that exact sentence – after that the story could go anywhere.
You can now read all 19 of our 260-word short stories here.
