Hey there! I just published my first short story on this site, “Port Manteau.” You can read it here, in its entirety, without charge!
For this week’s post, I wanted to give you a little behind-the-scenes on the story—so if you haven’t yet, go read it, it’s not long!
The seeds of this short story started to grow when I happened upon a list of portmanteaus. If you’re not sure exactly what a portmanteau is, they’re words that blend the sounds and meanings of two separate words.
For example, the word brunch is a portmanteau combining breakfast and lunch.
Anyway, when scrolling through a (surprisingly long) list of portmanteaus in the English language, I decided to challenge myself to write a short story including as many portmanteaus as I could. The title came pretty naturally, as you might imagine, especially when I decided the story should be set along the coast.
All in all, it was a fun writing experiment! Although I wasn’t quite able to meet my original goal of at least one portmanteau per sentence, I was still able to use approximately seventy in the story (see if you can spot them all!). Additionally, I was surprised by how weird the story became. It essentially chronicling a man’s descent into portmanteau-induced madness was something that I found amusing, and I hope you do, too!
Creative!
And now I want whatever banoffee is!