SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK is this week bittersweet proud to present our 2nd place winner’s story from our 2026 HUMOROUS SHORT STORY COMPETITION.

To our esteemed silver medalist, UK based Yvonne Lang, we say – you were this close to the top prize. But look on the bright side—you now get to spend the next week or so nursing a healthy, productive grudge that may very possibly fuel your next best-seller.

Coming in at a very prestigious, very impressive second place…

“So, let me get this straight – I told you to take care of the vampires, and you left toothbrushes and toothpaste in their garden?”

“Yes,” Esther answered, her bright earrings jangling as she nodded.
“So you didn’t kill them?” Derek checked. Esther’s eyes widened behind her purple rimmed glasses.

“Of course not. You asked me to take care of them!”
“Esther, I feel your staggering confusion about sayings has let us down again.”

Esther’s smile faltered.
“Oh no. Is this another one of those wrong-end-of-the-telescope moments?”
Derek massaged his temples.
“The phrase is the wrong end of the stick.”

Esther looked like a deer in headlights; a deer that had been dressed in a jumble sale by a blind woman. Derek had no idea if it she was on another one of her wacky home remedies again but she smelt like a takeaway.

“So you didn’t want me to take care of them?” Esther asked.
“Not literally no.”
“So I was meant to…”
“Kill them.”
“But that’s the opposite of taking care of them! I’m only a junior. You said I wasn’t up to being in charge of the swimming pool’s new car park. Why would you ask me to kill the undead? Actually – if they’re already dead does that mean I succeeded? An unintended concubine?”

“Consequence, not concubine. Are the vampires more dead than when you arrived?”
“No, they seemed quite chippy.”
“Why did you leave a dentists’ starter kit in the garden of vampires we are trying to evict?” A vein in Dereks forehead was pulsating.
“You told me to take care of them. They use their teeth a lot and oral health is important – often overlooked.”

An earlier comment of Esther’s suddenly resonated.
“Wait, they seemed chippy? How could you tell their mood?”
“I spoke to them.”
Derek was beginning to wonder if he was unknowingly suffering carbon monoxide poisoning delusions.

“You spoke to them?”
“They came out to see what I was doing. They were quite confused until I told them that you said if I took care of them that I could finally have a promotion. Which was great as in my last appraisal you said I could easily be replaced by a pigeon. Anyway, they offered me a better job themselves!”
“A job doing what?” Derek asked incredulously. Maybe being her employer would be what proved an end to their immortality.

“Bits and bobs. I’ve already done my first task for them.”
“Well I hope you are bloody more efficient for them than me. Did you understand their instructions?”
Esther nodded,
“Simple enough – remove the crosses and garlic from around your office.”
That focused Derek’s attention.

“Did it ever occur to you to ask why?”
Esther shook her head, earrings swinging,
“You don’t look a gift donkey in the mouth when the pension is that good.”
That butchered saying was the last thing Derek heard before Esther’s new employer flew in to take care of him.

Next week, the ghostly groans, giggles and guffaws continue with third place getter Komiko Noir‘s fun tale of overhead smashes and underworld specters –

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK has previously explored the subject of women’s participation in the game of chess HERE and HERE.

Now comes a new NETFLIX documentary that examines the life of the greatest female chess champion in history, Hungarian-born Judit Polgar (now aged 50).

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK boldly declares this 90-minute doco to be a five-star grand-master. It checks all the boxes for compelling, ‘brainy’ viewing.

Ladies and gentlemen, caffeine addicts, and people who spent three weeks staring at a blinking cursor only to write “The end” and call it a day—welcome!

THE SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK 2026 Humorous Short Story Competition asked you for comedy, and boy… did you guys deliver!

Received were stories that ranged on the laugh-o-meter from sympathy sniggers and gentle chuckles all the way up to – ‘I’m no longer reading this – I’m vibrating. With laughter‘.

But there can only be one winner. Well, three winners, actually. And here they are –

Were SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK a peacock, it would this moment be in full plumage.

We are tickled pink – actually, let’s make that a full-on shade of neon fuchsia – to present Samanatha’s winning story –

The day 56-year-old Manhattan dentist Phillip Yankum inherited run-down Blackwood Manor—a Victorian-era style house complete with suspicious turrets and windows covered in ‘ghost smudges’ – he arrived armed with nothing but an old bag of cleaning rags. In his back pocket however, he carried a state-of-the-art, Bluetooth-enabled Oral-B Pulsar 9000. You never knew when one of those might come in handy.

Working his way through the dust covered interior with its heavy-on-the-unsettling-oil-paintings aesthetic, Phil ascended the rickety staircase, trying not to breath in the damp air that smelled of wet cardboard and the lingering scent of a cabbage soup made in 1924.

Pushing open massive oak doors, Phillip crept into the master bedroom. In the corner, magically hovering above a stained marble sink, was a floating toothbrush. Phillip was temporarily frozen to the spot in amazement. He’d seen plenty of horror stories inside people’s mouths, but this was somehow more jaw-dropping.

The toothbrush wasn’t merely floating; on closer inspection Phillip could see it was performing a vigorous, mid-air cleaning of an invisible set of teeth. The brush scrubbed with a frantic, aggressive energy, its “sensitive gums” light flashing a panicked red.

“Um,” Phillip whispered. “That’s my plaque-control head.”

The toothbrush froze. Then, with a violent whir, it dived at him. Phillip shrieked, a sound usually reserved for Victorian orphans, and sprinted down the hallway. The ghost of Blackwood Manor, it turned out, was Sir Alistair Blackwood, a 17th-century aristocrat who had died of a catastrophic tooth abscess and was now obsessed with modern dental hygiene. He didn’t want the dentist’s soul; he wanted his bristles.

Phillip dove behind a crumbling velvet settee as the brush buzzed overhead. It was most definitely a wrong-end-of-the-telescope moment. In the grand scheme of the universe, he was being super-aggressively peer-reviewed by a spirit with a piece of molded resin and a two-minute timer.

“Enough!” Phillip yelled, finally mustering some of his Manhattan ‘Do you know who I am?’ confidence. “Sir Alistair, I presume? You’re using the wrong setting! That’s the ‘Deep Clean’ mode. It’ll ruin your ghostly enamel!”

The toothbrush paused, hovering mid-air with a curious tilt.

“You need the ‘Whitening’ pulse,” Phillip advised, slowly approaching. “And for heaven’s sake, you’re not even using paste. Do you want the phantom gingivitis?“

Amidst the cold air, he reached out and took the vibrating brush. Carefully, Manhattan Phil applied a pea-sized amount of “Cool Mint” gel. He clicked the button twice to the “Gentle Massage” setting and handed it back to the void. The brush began to move again, but this time with a rhythmic, satisfied hum. A faint, translucent sigh echoed through the bathroom.

For the rest of the night, intrepid cavity crusader Phillip Yankum sat on the edge of the tub, reading a magazine he’d retrieved from his car, while a dead nobleman polished his non-existent molars. Phillip thought about leaving a bill but realized that would be so transparently absurd.

Tune in next week when we are treated to 2nd place getter Yvonne Lang‘s garlic-mouthwash-flavored giggler –

While you’re here…check out this new 2026 read from the South Korean author who penned the bestselling “Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop’.

A special announcement for all word-wonks and aspiring class clowns: we have now reached the ‘frantic typing while dressed in your bathrobe’ stage of the 2026 SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK HUMOROUS SHORT STORY COMPETITION.

If you’ve been sitting on a comedic masterpiece—or even just a moderately amusing anecdote about a goat—the window of opportunity is closing faster than a laptop lid when a boss walks by.

Comedy is tragedy plus time, but if you run out of time, it’s just a tragedy. Don’t let your literary genius die in your “Drafts” folder alongside that half-finished screenplay about a detective who is also a dog.

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All details about the competition – including where to send entries – can be found HERE.

So before SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK closes its double-glazed decorative glass submission doors for another year and leaves you alone with your puns, send your funny, honey!

Eternal glory and a boost to your ego, not to mention hard cold cash and the chance to perform the SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK winner’s dance are yours for the taking.

SWS Victory Dance (Click HERE)

You don’t have to be screwball mad – like our avocado-colored pond friend above – to enter the SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK 2026 writing contest… but it probably wouldn’t hurt either.

What you do have to be is funny. Or at least mildly amusing. Because it is a HUMOROUS short story competition.

You can get all the knee-slapping, side-splitting details right HERE.

T minus 10, 9, 8, 7 – we have main engine start – 6, 5, 4 – prepare to launch – 3, 2, 1 – liftoff!

The 2026 SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK Humorous Short Story Competition kicks off today.

Here’s everything you need to know…

Entrants have a maximum of 500 words to compose a humorous short story based on one of the following four prompts –

2025 has been one thwackingly spectacular year – easily the best since party spoiler Covid (boo) exited the building stage left.

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK has been along for the ride, with you every step, breath, snicker and guffaw along the way. Cue the look-back…

Back in July, a female BBC newsreader was ‘disciplined’ by the station after she added a single additional word to a news story and accompanied that (spontaneous) modification with a nano-second- length eye expression judged to be a personal condemnation of the politically-correct-nonsense- speak she was forced to read.

‘The Donald’ had a lot of newsworthy moments in 2025. SWS judged this to be the highlight –

I do some of my best movie watching on planes. I watched THE SUBSTANCE (2024) at one o’clock in the morning on a flight back to Brisbane from Seoul, Korea. By the time we landed I was still recovering from the experience. Every person I’ve spoken to since who’s seen THE SUBSTANCE agrees – it truly is one of the most original, mind-freaking films to come along in a great many years.

Saw this one on DVD. Completely loved its quirkiness, something I wouldn’t normally associate Sean Connery with.

Why exactly did this one get the gong? Besides being generally funny, we reckon this bit of hilarity slash absurdity perfectly summarizes the SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK, er… ‘way’.

Argentinian born Lalo Schifrin composed music scores for close to 100 movies, including two of my all-time favorites DIRT HARRY (1971) and MAGNUM FORCE (1973). He is also responsible for the instantly recognizable MISSION IMPOSSIBLE theme.

Those 1990’s tv ads, complete with his distinctive horse-race-commentator’s voice, were cheese-flavoured, ear & eye-worm classics from a bygone era that somehow managed to drill their way deep down into every tv viewer’s of-the-era screen hippocampus (science talk for memory folks – but I knew that you knew that.

I could watch this scene from SUPERMAN 2 (1980) featuring Terrence Stamp a hundred thousand times and never tire of it. It’s so perfect.

What’s more left to say but…

2026 kicks off with a bang and a clang not to mention a thundering thwack on SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK with the January launch of the annual SWS Short Story Writing Competition.

It’s back bigger and badder (ie. gooder) than before with boosted cash prizes. Stay tuned, won’t you!

Show me a person that DOESN’T – at least partially – judge a book by its cover and I’ll show you a person who doesn’t read books.

Yes shacksters – (if I may be so bold as to use this wacked-out and possibly stylish honourific in your… er, honour) it’s time again to celebrate the best the year had to offer in book cover eye candy. And there’s a lot to celebrate.

(A) Royally weird and wonderful, your Majesty.

(B) Waaah

(A) So many interesting trains of thought with this one.

(B) Pink Splendor! You can just about hear the squeak.

(A) Nice balance (sorry!) between image and text.

(B) Now that’s a button!

(A) Clever and more than a little bit frightening.

(B) Is that tomato aimed at the reader or the guy in the brown suit? The red splatters already there might help you decide.

(A) My nomination for Book Cover of the Year. Nicknamed ‘Death by Lolly’.

(B) Love, love the LOST IN SPACE (1960’s) vibe to this cover.

(A) So vampy! If ever a cover deserved the red-carpet treatment, this is it. The spelling of ritual is pretty special too.

(B) It’s the phallic-shaped blood drip from the nose that really seals it for me.

(A) Another BOOK COVER OF THE YEAR nomination. Those car headlights are indeed next-level illuminating!

(B) One supremely kissable cover.

(A) You want clever text placement? We give you clever text placement.

(B) I’m so mutts about this cover! (again, sorry). What a Fire-God brilliant interpretation of the book’s title.

Two hot-in-different ways beguiling book covers.

(A) “A two-year-old could do better than this cover” I hear you say. Actually, it looks like a two-year-old DID this cover.

(B) Oh my! Green is most certainly the new black.

(A) Inhale on this smokin’ hot bit of eye trickery, if you will.

(B) Love how the text gradually morphs from FEAR to LESS.

(A) The word ‘arcane’ means ‘understood by few – mysterious – secret’. Yep.

(B) If you get the symbolism of the duck, then good. I definitely don’t. What I do get and dig (haven’t heard that word in a while have you?) is the simple beauty and balance of the colours, fonts and text placement of this work of art.

This post has been brought to you by the new (old) movie KILL BILL : THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR

To get HAPPY (DAYS) – click HERE

A few nights back, an Australian current affairs program ran a hard-luck story about a Brisbane-based amateur author by the name of Douglas Rowell.

‘Doug’, who is 88 years old and resides in an aged-care home, claimed to have been scammed out of $55 000 (AUD) by an American self-publishing (aka vanity press) book company.

The American publisher at the center of Doug’s misgivings is Indiana-based XLIBRIS.

A company bearing the XLIBRIS name also has an Australian HQ based in Chatswood, Sydney NSW.

This is a link to their website – Home | Xlibris Publishing and this is the story that ran on the Channel 9 Australia program A CURRENT AFFAIR a few nights back –

Like pretty much all pay-to-publish companies, XLIBRIS offer a collection of tiered packages, starting at no-frills and affordably priced bundles right up to all-inclusive, ‘gold class’ packages that manage and streamline every detail of the production and marketing of a self-published book.

The claim by Channel 9’s A CURRENT AFFAIR that Doug had been charged $55 000 AUD seemed odd, considering the most expensive, all-inclusive publishing package offered by XLIBRIS – their SIGNATURE package – is priced at less than half that amount.

I got in touch with a representative from XLIBRIS and made some interesting discoveries. The Channel 9 story claims that XLIBRIS cold-called Doug after they spotted his book on-line, already self-published by another company (IN HOUSE PUBLISHING).

The XLIBRIS representative I spoke to (Sandra Powell from Xlibris’s parent company AUTHOR SOLUTIONS) was clear that XLIBRIS never solicits authors or cold-calls prospective clients. Doug would have had to have filled out a form asking to be contacted by XLIBRIS.

The story also makes the claim that after forking over $55 000 (again, Channel 9 provides no clues or itemization as to how this random, so-perfectly-rounded mystery figure was determined) Doug’s book was never published and his requests for a refund were ignored.

XLIBRIS deny both accusations. They maintain there is no record of Doug ever having requested a refund for any portion of the fees he paid and that Doug himself effectively prevented the book from being published as he failed to sign-off on approvals for cover and interior design that were sent to him.

I know from my own experience self-publishing last year (with the company TELLWELL) the process cannot proceed to the next stage until that back-and-forth approval procedure conducted between the author and the publishing company has been completed.

Scenic Writer’s Shack suspects the ‘something else’ going on is quite simply A CURRENT AFFAIR doing what it has always done so well – that is, funneling information into overly simplistic good guy vs bad guy scenarios in an effort to spark outrage and play on viewer’s emotions.

In this story, nursing home resident and memoir-writing ‘Doug’ is depicted as the innocent good guy, while publishing company XLIBRIS is given horns and a pitchfork and painted as a money-hungry, deceptive and face-less corporation that cruelly sought to exploit the well-intentioned ambitions of a humble retiree.

The truth, as I have uncovered, is far less black and white.

More than a thousand customer on-line reviews of XLIBRIS reveal that 2 out of every 3 people who have self-published with the company awarded the experience a four or five-star rating.

SCENIC WRITER’S SHACK was beyond impressed at the way XLIBRIS responded on-line to customers who expressed dissatisfaction.

It is my belief that the self-publishing industry comes inbuilt with a certain percentage of dissatisfied customers.

Amateur hobbyist authors who begin to realize after they are already a fair way down the self-publishing track that their initial lofty ambitions of becoming the next James Patterson, Danielle Steele, James Grisham or Nora Roberts are in fact never likely to be realized, can and often do direct their frustration at the very people attempting to turn their writing dreams into some form of reality.

When I first watched the hard-luck story put to air by Channel 9 Australia on hobby-author Doug earlier this week, I was, like most other people, and certainly like the on-line commenters HERE and HERE, initially outraged as well.

With emotion-charged language supporting ‘Poor Team Doug’ sent flying like confetti at a wedding and screen-shots like those pictured below ramping up the anti-publishing company sentiment to fever pitch, this was exactly the type of response the producers of the story were hoping for.

However, after some digging, it’s clear there’s other sides to this story that don’t appear to be as black and white. Channel 9 have been approached for comment but are yet to respond.

In today’s final instalment, we learn some of the crafty methods Gregory used to keep himself hidden from sight whilst in the forest for ten+ years.

Whenever people walked down the creek towards my territory, I’d have already put my fire out as a precaution.

I’d have heard them coming a mile off – or smelled their ciggies. They’d usually look around a bit, marvel at the view from the top of the waterfall and inevitably spot one of my bogus tracks on the northern side of the creek.

I’d sit in a hidey-hole on my side and watch them disappear into the bush. After a while I’d see them stop, bewildered that the trail just ended. Sometimes they’d look straight up at the rainforest canopy. I don’t know if they were expecting to see a spaceship or a drop bear but I found it tremendously amusing.

Sometimes, if I was feeling particuarly fiendish, I’d whip up a set of baby tracks for the weekend warriors to puzzle over. These were easy to contruct and they really screwed with people’s minds.

I’d make a fist and gently press it into the sand of the creek bank, leaving what looked like the curl of a human foot, only tiny. Using a finger I’d smudge little toe prints near the top and, with alternate hands, I’d make a trail of minature footprints all the way down to the creek.

Voila! Human baby tracks in the middle of nowhere! Freaky stuff.

To get happy, click HERE.

For the next few weeks, we’re going to read some brilliant excerpts from OUT OF THE FOREST. Today we learn of one of the superpowers Gregory developed during his time in the wilderness.

Although I’d lost my grip on the passing of days I had gained an incredibly heightened sense of smell out there in the time warp.

Once a month or so I’d trek out of the forest and make my way into the nearest town which was Mullimbimby (northern New South Wales)

I had a special park bench in the middle of Australia’s premier hippie town I called the ‘smelling chair’.

I’d sit there with my eyes closed and inhale the scent of the people passsing by. It was amazing to me that I could smell individuals within the crowds.

I could tell the difference between female and male; between blokes who washed and blokes who didn’t. I could smell people who ate garlic the night before; frankincense, musk, different soaps, different colognes and perfumes; even the items people were carrying.

After a number of trips into ‘the big smoke’, there were three or four people I could identify by their odor. My favorite was a particular fragrant female whose perfume I loved. Since I kept my eyes closed I have no idea who she was or what she looked like.

There was a flipside, though: some blokes stank so badly it just about made me gag. Ironically, I knew I reeked as well but I couldn’t really smell me; it was lived in scent.

In our final instalment next week, we check out some of the crafty ways Gregory used to conceal himself in the forest.