Keoki and Lani
This was the index page for a series of short stories written on the blog through 2009. It listed the instalments in order and linked to each one.
The series
Eight instalments were listed here, in this order:
- Keoki and Lani
- Keoki and Lani’s Vacation
- Keoki and Lani Return
- Keoki and Lani’s Picnic
- Keoki and Lani’s New Day
- Keoki, Lani and George
- Keoki and Lani Return
- Keoki and Lani Say Goodbye
The instalment titles are listed as a series index; full story text is not included. New fiction is not supplied in its place, and a story that ends with “Say Goodbye” deserves better than a guess at what happened in it.
So the index stands as an index. It is a table of contents for a book that is no longer in the building.
Reading the titles
You can tell a certain amount from a list of eight titles even so. Keoki and Lani are the Hawaiian forms of George and Rose — which makes the sixth instalment, “Keoki, Lani and George”, either a joke or a complication, and possibly both. The sequence runs through a vacation, a return, a picnic and a new day before it says goodbye, which is the shape of something gentler and more domestic than dramatic.
If you want the names properly rather than as a guess, the standard Hawaiian dictionaries are searchable at Wehewehe, and the Hawaiian-language collections at Ulukau hold a great deal of the real literature that a series like this was, at some distance, echoing.
Where the writing went instead
The fiction habit did not stop when the series did — it moved into a format with other people in it. Portrait of Words, the monthly writing challenge hosted here from 2010, handed out five photographic prompts a month and asked anyone who fancied it to build a story from them. It ran for a year before being retired for lack of participation, and its guidelines are fully preserved.
Between the two, the second format remains directly usable by anybody who reads it. A serial depends on its author; a set of prompts and rules can continue to inspire new work.
More writing from the blog
The Muffed Target changeover post shows another side of the blog’s writing culture, while the Portrait of Words guidelines explain its longer monthly exercise. Together they place this story index within a wider habit of shared prompts and recurring features.
Hey, it’s only my opinion.
A Hui Hou