Flash Fiction Chronicles

The editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles asked me to write a post about my writing life and I’m happy to answer her questions, though my first response was to make a joke, but she wouldn’t take “no” for an answer so here are my responses to her insistent questions.

How do I manage to be so prolific? 

I write for an audience and the audience is mostly the folks in my writer’s community.  We do challenges every week and that gives me something to write about and it keeps me writing regularly.  They are very short pieces of course.  I’m in flash poetry forum too so I usually write one to two pieces of poetry and flash a week.  That’s output!  

Of course I have a few other little audiences as well – the audience at Every Day Fiction, Bewildering Stories, Static Movement and last but not least, Micro Horror.  I tend to put stories together in such a way that they can be submitted to one of those magazines and I have a few others I submit to too.  10FLASH and Doorknobs and Bodypaint run regular themed challenges and I can’t resist that.  

I’ve been on over-drive throughout October.  The Halloween Competition at Micro Horror always inspires me.  I wrote six flashes for that this year.  I usually send one a month but I just love Halloween!  I’ve won the competition twice and the prize is always something unique and well worth winning but I’d do it anyway.  My husband says I have to lose sometime but even if I lose I win because I get read.  I’m a most unusual candidate for writing horror because I don’t read horror – too scary!  But my brand of horror is I think fairly traditional – more ‘chiller’ than horror.  I was invited to write a story for Toe Tags because Brian Barnett and William Pauley III liked my Micro Horror work.  That was great! 

I love when somebody wants me to tell them a story.  Being so prolific in the way that I am does have a down side.  I don’t have a book out there and I’m just vain enough to think that I should.  Larger projects tend to get pushed out by ‘immediate gratification’.  I have a collection of poetry but it wasn’t big enough to go for the Crashaw Prize – I’d not have won anyway…  I have 7 chapters of a novella, and unfinished business with some Technopolymorphs I know.

 Where do I get ideas? 

For a start, I write according to prescribed parameters.  I mostly know the length and the theme and sometimes the genre I am going to write.  After that I use whatever knowledge and experience life has thrown at me, information gleaned from internet research, conversations with my very erudite spouse, other peoples’ conversations at the pool, on the bus – anything really. 

I look for a character’s name to give me an idea who I’m talking about and then I people his or her world and it seems to fall into place with the name.  

How long does it take? 

It’s a piece of string.  Sometimes the first draft is almost the final draft.  “Trip to Tangier” took me two years.  “Dance” took me three.  I had a poem published in Twisted Tongue that I finally got right after twenty years!  “Resolution,” a favourite for many EDF readers took me just over half an hour and one revision. 

Sometimes you just know when something is right.  At other times it takes a clever editor’s eye to see where improvements are needed.  My story “Dock,” due this month in EDF on November 15, was one of those.  It just needed a tiny tweak but I needed Camille and the team to tell me that.  

Well, Gay I hope that answers your questions – thanks for asking!

Oonah V. Joslin is the winner of two Micro Horror prizes and an honoree in The 2009 Binnacle Comp. Full lists of what went where available on at Oonah’s Every Day Fiction author site. She also served as judge of  The Shine Poetry Competition 2008 and is managing editor of Every Day Poets. Anthologies: The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008, Toe Tags, and  A Man of Few Words.

When my story “Nipped in the Bud” posted on Every Day Fiction in August, I was eager to see the sort of feedback I would receive.  And then I saw what people had written.  Oh boy.  Reader comments ranged from calling it “hokey” to “it just doesn’t seem to go anywhere.”  I cringed, but I couldn’t really complain.  After all, when my own mother read “Nipped in the Bud,” her first reaction was, “That’s awful!”  She understood the story, and it horrified her.

If one of my greatest supporters says that, I can’t really gripe about comments from strangers.

However, I’ve seen other stories on Every Day Fiction and elsewhere get similar feedback.  Some authors don’t take it well.  They respond to every negative comment, getting both apologetic and defensive.  It leaves me wondering – will this author keep writing?  Or will these harsh words convince them to stop submitting?

Internet anonymity inspires people to type words they wouldn’t dare say face-to-face.  Honesty is important, but so is tact.  Instead of subscribing to the motto of, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all’ people do say very un-nice things to total strangers – and people get hurt.  Some give up writing.

I’m not at that point now, but I have been in the past.  When I was a teenager, I vowed to be a published novelist by the time I was twenty.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have the spine to make a real attempt.  Two of my well-meaning uncles approached me and told me that I was putting my immortal soul in peril by writing fantasy.  My college creative writing teacher witnessed me reading a fantasy novel and was aghast.  “That’s not a real book,” he said.

By the time I was nineteen, I wasn’t even sure what to read anymore.  As for writing, I stopped completely.

Yes, I was a wimp.  Writing and rejection require a hard shell, and I couldn’t cope.  I wanted my writing to please everyone – which was downright impossible, no matter the genre.  It took me another ten years to mature and take my writing seriously and understand that criticism is part of the business.

Time and time again, editors advise writers “don’t take it personally.”  There is truth to that.  However, as a writer – especially a vulnerable beginner – some people will have a harder time separating themselves from their writing.  That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be given negative feedback.  It’s necessary.  It’s how we grow and improve, whether the project is flash fiction or a full novel draft.  But even if a story comes across as complete nonsensical garbage, that doesn’t mean it should be described in comments that way.  Tact and respect are not antiquated notions.  At least, I hope not.

I can handle my story being hokey and sometimes misunderstood.  As long as some people get it – and enjoy it – that’s what matters.  If I’m going to put my soul on the line, I don’t want it to be a total waste.

Beth Cato’s work has appeared in places such as Every Day Fiction, Niteblade Fantasy and Horror Magazine, Crossed Genres, and Six Sentences. A full list of her publication credits is available at BethCato.com.

In a previous post I talked about the limits of flash fiction — the hard ceiling of 1,000 (or sometimes less) words that force a writer to focus his energies in such a way that makes him, paradoxically, freer to explore techniques of language and narrative. In that post I talked of gardens of various sizes, and mentioned walls and fences. The walls of my analogy were the hard word limits of flash beyond which no word count could go.

But think of flash fiction — indeed, all fiction — as being surrounded not by a fence, but a window frame. When we look out the window from a fixed position we see only a slice of the world itself. Prior experience tells us there is more to the world than meets the eye, but so too do various clues in the scene itself — perhaps we only see a part of a road, or the shadow of a tree, or, indeed, neighbors moving in and out of frame. Good, evocative fiction should do this too, it should hint at a larger world.

My own domain of genre fiction demands this more so than contemporary fiction, and so as a technique I think it is more important for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and assorted other ’speculative’ or fantastical stories to seed their story with such cues to achieve a measure of believability. Set a story in the modern world dealing with modern problems and the believability is already there — both the audience and, perhaps more importantly, the author believe in that world because they live in it already.

One of my favorite things about Every Day Fiction are the comments left by such a large variety of readers. And there is always one thing I want to see in the comments section, one thing that lets me know I succeeded in my job as illusionist and world-maker, and that’s when someone tells me that the story felt like part of something larger. That means nothing more nor less than my fictional world had achieved a level of believability that persuaded the reader into thinking that there was indeed more beyond the frame of the window.

And, truth be told, there always is more beyond the frame that the reader does not see — the ideas the writer has about the world and its characters that just don’t fit in the story in explicit or elaborated-upon ways. But rarely is there a great deal, as least for my stories, as it doesn’t make sense to imagine a novel’s worth of back story to lend authenticity to a 1,000 word piece of fiction — if that were the case, one would just write the novel. No, there is a trick to it.

The first and most important aspect of doing this has to be the the writer’s own belief. You have to believe you are writing about a world and character that exists beyond the 1,000 word window frame that you are confining them to. This isn’t magical thinking on the writer’s part, rather it is a deliberate way to get into the mindset of someone writing contemporary fiction. In contemporary fiction, the author knows the world intimately because it is the one he lives in, and he is free to reference or hint at so much that we all take for granted. And that’s the second part of our approach, taking things for granted.

Robert A. Heinlein is famously held up as an example in this regard; whereas science fiction prior to him would often draw attention to the differences in the setting with descriptions of the gee-whiz gadgetry, Heinlein would cut right through it with something as simple as his character crossing from one room to another through an electronic door with the words ‘the door dilated.’ Major breakthrough in believability, because it presents an unfamiliar world as familiar, and therefore gives it a reality that exists apart from the narrative. Heinlein took the old SF fence of highlighting the differences of things and turned it into a window frame that suggested that those things you wanted to know where all there if you were to just tilt your head and look through the frame at a different angle.

Giving your audience everything on a plate is the worst way to tell a story — in fact, it’s often what’s meant by the condemnation of ‘telling’ rather than ’showing.’ The best way to paint a scene is to get your reader to imagine it for themselves — and sometimes that can be done more effectively with fewer, rather than more, words. By the same token, making a world feel real to an audience involves getting them to supply the answers to questions you carefully suggest to them. ‘The door dilated’ does this beautifully, as the reader instantly imagines for himself what a more plodding author would have begged him to believe with an extended description. Getting your reader to internalize the truth of your world by forcing them to meet you halfway on some of the speculative or unique elements within it makes such fiction essentially collaborative.

Curiously, I sometimes hear ‘this felt like something bigger, I wanted more’ as a kind of minor criticism, as if by suggesting a larger world and then not delivering it in full I’ve somehow reneged on my authorial agreement. I know how to read between the lines when I see this. When the reader might bring this up as a flaw I see it as proof positive that they had become emotionally involved in my story and believed it enough to be disappointed when they realized there was in fact a fence obscuring their view of the rest of the world where they had been certain a window frame existed. Perhaps they feel as if a trick as been pulled on them — and it has, as writing is a great deal about illusions and trickery.  Wanting to see the rest of a world that does not exist — that is, in fact, constructed almost entirely out of a few hinting references scattered here and there and made stronger by authorial conviction — and then being disappointed that you can not indeed actually see that world, must to be the greatest compliment of all. Especially in flash fiction. The point of hinting at a larger world within flash fiction is not to satiate readers, but to whet their appetites.

Bill Ward is, most probably, a figment of his own imagination. His flash has appeared at Every Day Fiction, Murky Depths, and the anthologies Dead Souls and Northern Haunts, as well as The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008. He blogs about all things genre at www.billwardwriter.com.

Sharon E. Trotter (pictured) won First Place in our 1st String-of-10 Flash Fiction Contest with her story, The Haircut, to be published in Every Day Fiction in the month of October.

 This is the first time Flash Fiction Chronicles has sponsored a flash fiction contest, and for being a first-time thing,  it went fairly smoothly.  We had 49 entries from about 42 different authors.  So cool to have such variety and participation first time out.

What I did to make certain I came fresh to reading the entries was to set up a system so that I would not know who the authors.  I did this by assigning each submission with an entry number and then, copying and pasting each story without author names into a Word document .  I then set the stories aside and didn’t read any of them for a week.

Once I started, I read every piece twice.  First making comments about what worked for me and what struck me either as unclear or awkward or trite, etc.  Then I read the stories again to select my favorite 23 and a third time to narrow it down to 10.  I decided there really were 11 that I wanted to have on the short list. 

At this point I asked for help judging to winners.  They were Camille Gooderham Campbell,Managing Editor of Every Day Fiction; Sarah Hilary, distinguished short story writer and frequent EDF contributor; KC Ball, Editor of 10Flash and slush reader for EDF, and distinguished short story writer, Robert Swartwood, editor of  W.W. Norton’s Hint Fiction Anthology, distinguished short story writer, and EDF contributer; Hillary Degani, slush reader for EDF, and myself, editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles. Thank you, judges for all your time and effort.

The judges received the anonymous entries and a work sheet on which they ranked each story from 1 to 11.  From these rankings, I was able to determine each story’s RANK, the lowest score resulting in the highest ranking, The Haircut, The Forever Summer, and Choices receiving the three lowest scores and therefore the rank of 1st, 2nd, 3rd.  (I’ve been told Future Writers of America and Football rankings are similarly determined).

It was interesting to see how all the writers incorporated the prompt words into their stories.  They had to use at least four of the prompt words in their stories.  Many people were able to use the words so skillfully that it was not evident which prompts were used.  Kudos to you.  I also gave them a quotation.  This was to serve as more inspiration than anything else, but several were able to imply in their subs something related to the quotation.  Here is the String-of-10 Flash Fiction Prompt.

STRING OF TEN: BLOW BACK-STORM-JAUNDICE-STEAM-TATTOO-SENSE OF FUN-CANTALOUPE-STREAKED-UMBER-DRIPPING SWEAT

QUOTATION: And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? –Tillie Olsen  

Actually KUDOS to all of you who entered.  There were some fabulous openings that drew me right in, voices that felt unique, and many characters that I enjoyed meeting.  I can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with next time.

Here are some of the comments offered by the judges on Sharon’s submission.

From Camille Gooderham-Campbell, Managing Editor of Every Day Fiction & Writer. Website: Copy. Edit. Proof.

Nice sparse prose and a pair of excellently drawn characters. The prompts were well blended in, and the last paragraph wrapped the piece up perfectly. Terminal illness makes a fairly direct interpretation of the prompt quote, but the tattoos and the subtle delivery take it to the next level for me.

From Sarah Hilary, Award-winning Writer. Website: Crawl Space.

I felt as if I’d known these ladies all my life, just excellently done. The obligatory words (umber etc) didn’t yell out at me at all here, the only story where they didn’t, but mostly it was the character dynamic that grabbed me from the first sentence and held me to the last. Head and shoulders above the others, for my money.

From Gay Degani, Editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles and Writer. Website: Words in Place.

Smooth, excellent writing with a good opening and strong voice.  The last paragraph is excellent. There is growth shown in the narrator.  My favorite.  Definitely.  Thoroughly professional.

THE WINNERS

 HONORABLE MENTION

 THE FINALISTS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

Consider lightning.  This phenomenon cracks open the sky, takes our breath away, but we might miss it if not for the warning of thunder.  We hear the deep rumble, we look up, tension sparking the air, and wait for the flash.  Thunder grabs our attention and lightning dazzles our eyes, and together they stir our hearts. 

Flash Fiction is fast, a 1000 words or less, every sentence written with purpose, not a word to waste.  And if this statement is true, it’s even truer for the first few words.   

In a story, especially a short story, the opening sentence, like thunder, arrests our attention, charms us, makes us curious.  If it doesn’t, we’ll turn our heads, move on, and miss the show. 

Consider the following examples from Every Day Fiction’s Top Ten List. 

We were children, not lovers, but as we lay on the grass looking at stars, talking of angels, she took my hand and said that a moment can change everything.  One Bright Moment, by Joel Willans.

“You are my heart and muscle, Yardi,” Napier would say. “There is no criminal in all of Marseilles who can stand against us.” Without Napier, by Michael Ehart.

Do they create tension?  Do they conjure up an image? How much do they tell the reader about character, plot, and setting?  What do they promise the reader?  Do they have a rhythm that seduces? In other words, do they rumble? 

Although not every first sentence can fulfill every purpose, a well-crafted one will announce, at the very least, something is about to happen.

What is “about to happen” in “One Bright Moment?”

Two children are star-gazing, talking of angels, and one says “a moment can change everything.”  The reader might be thinking, “what kind of moment?”  A good one?  Bad one?

Is there tension? 

The two main characters, a boy and a girl, are talking about angels.  This might suggest to a reader that death is lurking down the page or perhaps an illness.  The reader knows the peaceful first moment is brief. 

Is there an image? 

Children on their backs in the grass close enough to each other to join hands. 

What does the first line promise? 

This boy and girl are “not lovers,” but the reader might wonder, will they be lovers, and is this what this story is about?  Or will it be about what stands in their way, what will change in a moment?

What is “about to happen” in “Without Napier,” the second example.

Two men work as an “invincible” team against the criminal element, but the reader senses that one of the partners is no longer around through the words, “Napier would say…”  This perception is reinforced by the title of the story. 

Is there tension? 

Each of the two characters, Napier and Yardi, has his own skill set.  The reader understands that if Yardi is the heart and muscle, then Napier must be the brains. If one of the partners is gone and the other must fight alone, will he survive?

Is there an image? 

An implied image of two men working together on the side of right because they work against the criminal element, but with the designation of the setting, “Marseilles,” the whole of a reader’s knowledge of France, sea ports, and a few French words comes into play.  

What does the first line promise? 

The partner who is left behind will probably have to fight against the criminal element.  Without the “brains” of the operation, he will be the underdog.  Will he be smart enough to succeed?

 In the examples above, much is given to the reader as soon as he or she begins to read.

• The general nature of the characters, children, not old enough to be lovers, in one; male colleagues in the other. 
• A sense that whatever the situation has been, that situation will change in the story, thus creating tension.
• The setting is also suggested by the language used, a grassy place at night in “Moment” and a French seaport in “Napier.” 
• Characters set down in a specific place and time create an image for the reader.
• Each first line offers a question to be answered by the end of the piece: what will change for the two children in a moment and will Yardi survive without Napier?
• Each line has a rhythm that suggests the tone of the story.

Sometimes a perfect first sentence comes into a writer’s mind and inspires a particular story.  The words grow from those beginnings for the writer just as they grow for the reader.

However, frequently the language a writer uses to get himself started will not survive the rigors of writing and rewriting .  What the writer thought he was going to write changes.  In that case, it is the responsibility of the writer to craft openings that will entice readers and authentically enhance the story that follows. 

I’m not saying that a strong first line can make or break a story, but if a reader isn’t caught up in the first few sentences, he may not read far enough into the story to find out how good it is.

Here are some examples of openings.  Which entice you enough to click the link?  Do they have rhythm? Do they rumble?

“H… hello, Mr. Sterne.”

Water drips from icicles outside the kitchen window.

It was over 80 degrees in our Hollywood bungalow when my mother opened the door to our O’Keefe and Merritt oven, turned on the gas, and stuck in her head.

 He was D44 and Linda was D45, and, not being the earliest to take their seats, they did the sideways shuffle, coats in hand with smiling apologies.

 Aye aye, lad. You made it then. You cut it so fine I was beginning to think you might not be coming.

Tires crunched driveway stone and a black sedan appeared at the gate.

A toothpick hung from Lester’s mouth.

Three cookies arrived with our check from Pappa Chow’s Chinese Buffet.

I may have mentioned that I’ve been wading through the slush pool over at Every Day Fiction since February.

It’s been an interesting experience, one every writer should try for a time. It doesn’t take long to realize that editors show real restraint when they call the unsolicited manuscript stack “slush”.

But I don’t want to talk about bad writing this time around. I want to discuss a pitfall that claims too many writers, regardless of ability. God knows I’ve stepped into this sort of trap myself, from time to time.

The over-used concept.

If you read much fiction, you know what I mean. Stories about planning the perfect crime. Making a deal with the devil. Murdering a spouse. Picking up a hitch-hiking ghost.

The list goes on and on.

I don’t mean to suggest that something fresh can’t come out of such an idea. It can, it does, but here’s the thing. Authors who take an over-used concept and make it work manage it with style, because their every word sings, rather than straight story-telling technique.

An editor that buys such a story is doing so because they have said, “Damn, look at the way she (or he) makes those words sit up and speak.” Not, “Wow, what a great story!”

So, a word to the wise.

If you want freshness in your flash fiction, look for the true details of life, the small events that draw emotion from your readers because they touch upon what is real. But if you just must write about a character that tries to outwit Old Nick or offers a ride to long-dead lovers, make certain that your story can carry the tune.

Right up to the very last note.

#

K. C. Ball grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and now lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound.

Her flash fiction has appeared on-line at Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Fear & Trembling, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Murky Depths #8 and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology.

Her most recent flash, At Both Ends, is set to appear in Flash Fiction Online in June and one of her longer pieces, Coward’s Steel, won 3rd place in the Hubbard Foundation’s 1st Quarter, 2009, Writers of the Future competition.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and blogs about writing at A Moving Line or whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.

Most professional writers agree that standard manuscript format means double line spacing, one-inch margins and Courier typeface (because each letter takes up the same space on a line).

The other standard that seems to be settling in is that maximum length for flash fiction is one thousand words.

If we use those two standards, we arrive at a manuscript length for flash fiction of four to five pages. Maybe six, if there are a lot of short paragraphs and plenty of white space.

You would think that any experienced writer could knock that out over a weekend and still have time for Sunday morning brunch. You would be wrong.

Working as a slush reader over the past four months for Every Day Fiction has shown me how many writers, who think they can write flash, just don’t have a clue.

Wading through the slush, we see bits and pieces of stories. Anecdotes. Aphorisms. But only one in ten is a complete story and one in twenty or thirty is a good complete story.

Yes, you say, but many of those submissions are from writers still learning the craft. Maybe, but the sad truth is that even experienced writers struggle with flash. Many experienced writers can’t write anything less than novel length.

Best-selling novelist James Michener is supposed to have said, “In six pages I can’t even say hello.” He has lots of company.

Since last June, I’ve written fifty pieces of flash fiction, about one a week. Some I’m still polishing. Some I have retired; I call them dead soldiers. Twenty four have been accepted for publication, most of which have appeared in print.

And here are some notions about flash I have developed over the past year; no hard and fast rules or standards, just notions that work for me:

• Keep character count low; no more than three. The story feels crowded if there are more.
• Don’t give any character a name or description unless you want readers to pay attention to the character. Readers have different expectations after being introduced to Millie Roberts, the red-head at the register, than to the check-out clerk. And it’s fewer words.
• Make every word says just what you want it to say. I know you’ve heard this one before but you can’t hear it too many times. You have a thousand words and precision cuts to the heart of a thing with speed and clarity.
• Slash most adjectives and ALL adverbs. Be ruthless. You can smother a noun in modifiers, cut the courage right out of it, and any verb that needs modifiers can be replaced by a stronger verb. Ran rapidly and scrambled mean the same thing and scrambled sounds exciting.
• Write about our world. You must explain special rules for a fantasy world and that chews up word count. It can be done, Every Day Fiction has presented some marvelous fantasy flash, but it’s difficult to pull off and should be set aside unless there is no other way to tell the tale.
• Focus on small events. One man battling a nest of hornets he stumbles upon in his backyard is no less dramatic, has no less conflict, than a score of soldiers engaged in jungle combat.
• Be aware of word count every second you write. People say, “I can always come back when I’m done and trim it down.” Maybe so, but many can’t. It’s easier to keep track of the ticking meter along the way.
• For God’s sake, edit. Submitting a first draft is lazy. You can scrub the life out of a story, of course, but nothing is so brilliant that it can’t benefit from a bit of polish.

#

K. C. Ball is a retired newspaper reporter and media relations coordinator. She grew up in Ohio, with her nose in a book, and she now lives in Seattle, a stone’s throw from Puget Sound.

Her flash fiction has appeared on-line at Every Day Fiction, Boston Literary Magazine, Fear & Trembling, Residential Aliens, Every Day Weirdness, Flashshot and Moon Drenched Fables, as well as in print in Murky Depths and the 2008 Best of Every Day Fiction anthology. Her longer stories have also appeared in on-line and print magazines.

K. C. is a staff reader for Every Day Fiction and a Finalist in the 1st Quarter 2009 Writers of the Future competition. She blogs about writing at A Moving Line and about whatever may strike her fancy at Now Playing in Seattle.

By its nature, flash fiction often captures brief moments in time, snapshots of a character’s life. These snapshots can cover a profound moment of epiphany or change in the status quo, or simply express the universal mundane. Flash is like a news story – the audience gets a condensed biography and a summary of what could be the defining moment of a human being’s life.

Much like reporters, though, sometimes we fiction writers get scooped. For example, science is particularly good at coming up with advances and scenarios that even the best writers can’t imagine. The realities of cloning, for example, are far different from most of the speculative hyperventilating that predates the technology (or the political hyperventilating that came after).

Science aside, real life is messy and complicated, and there’s little that writers can imagine that hasn’t happened to someone somewhere, and probably in a more ridiculous fashion than anyone could make up. Take recent events in Mexico, for example; a drug war, flu outbreak, and an earthquake all in just a few weeks? Come on now, Mexico. Your readers can only be asked to buy so much. That’s one plot twist too many if you ask me. What’s next week, a zombie outbreak?

Shortly after Every Day Fiction accepted my story “Aftershocks” (go check it out first if you haven’t already, as I don’t want to spoil anything) a tragic news report came out that mirrored the core events of the story. A 12-year-old boy killed a man, stabbed him in the back, in defense of his mother, who was being choked. At first I fretted over the story, worried that perhaps I would look like I’d just imitated the real events. Not that I was the first to ever suggest such a thing could happen, just that the timing was a little too convenient.

The thing that saved me, though? And really the thing that saves all of us fiction writers?

It doesn’t matter.

If we aren’t stealing (accidentally or otherwise) something from the real world, cleaning it up and presenting it with witty dialogue, a genre trope, and a likeable character or two, we aren’t doing our job. Perhaps a new setting puts a different shade of meaning on the events. Maybe making the hero a different gender will cast light on taboo issues. What really makes a story interesting is the spin and package that the author puts on the events. Stories are fun as a result of language and perspective as much as the facts or plot points. In flash fiction, in which there is often very few events, language and perspective may even be significantly more important.

Our art imitates life. And occasionally, if we are lucky, life will imitate our art. Except for the zombie outbreaks. I could do without those.

Alexander Burns lives in Fort Worth, Texas. He writes because he doesn’t have a basement in which build robots or time machines. His work has appeared at Every Day Fiction and A Thousand Faces.

2007 was a rough year for short fiction. Readership of literary magazines was shrinking, even among the traditionally strong genre markets. Readers of science fiction and fantasy flocked to fully immersive video games, and older readers turned to non-fiction either as required reading for their jobs, or simply to get an edge in the marketplace. Readers, like music listeners, had come to believe that there was so much content on the Internet available free of charge, that they shouldn’t have to pay to read good fiction. No one had yet figured out a business model or a format to adapt to this scary new medium.

The picture wasn’t entirely bleak. In one area, people were reading more than ever. Blogging was starting to take off. In 2006, Wired magazine estimated that 57 million Americans were reading blogs, with some 12 million of them writing their own. I – like many budding authors – was writing my own blog, “Without Really Trying,” that had attracted somewhere north of a hundred readers, which really wasn’t bad for an unknown, barely published author. While my blog was destined to fade into obscurity, I’d learned a few very important lessons on blogging in general. The Internet’s most popular blogs like Boing Boing, Engaget and Gizmodo, all had one thing in common – daily content.

So if more people than ever were reading, how come they weren’t reading fiction? At that time, it seemed like short fiction magazines had simply migrated onto the Internet with little thought of the dynamics of the medium. “Issues” were now electronic, but still launched quarterly, so readers would only return to the site every three months, which is a lifetime in Internet time. Small wonder that magazines like Noctem Aeternus, Grendel Song, and Serpentarius sprang up and then disappeared after only one issue. As I am writing this, City Slab, an online horror magazine, has just closed its doors. It was obvious that traditional business models were on lifesupport. What was needed was a magazine that could combine the best of blogging with an old-style short fiction market. In effect, the short fiction magazine was dead. Long live the short fiction magazine.

EDF launched in July of 2007 with one simple mission: get people reading short fiction again. We would feature a new, easily digestible short story every single day. It would be of flash fiction length ( 1000 words or less ) so that it would appeal to the short attention span of the average Internet surfer. Finally, Camille and I made the decision early on to avoid one of the most common pitfalls of the short fiction magazine – though we were both writers, Camille and I would never publish our own work in the magazine. Was our format revolutionary? Though there were magazines like 365 Tomorrows who published new fiction daily, we were the first to draw all of our content from writers’ submissions. And the response has been incredible. We had 200 subscribers before we opened our doors, and growth was exponential. Today, we have nearly 1,500 RSS and e-mail subscribers, averaging over 10,000 unique readers a month.

If you’ve been to the site, you’ll have noticed the clean lines and uncluttered design of a front page that focuses on the day’s story, and that’s all that most readers will ever see. However, if you look behind the scenes, you’ll find a highly specialized engine for processing large volumes of submissions. EDF’s publishing schedule is one of the most aggressive in short fiction, especially for staff members who volunteer what little time they have away from their families and the ever-present day job. We get an average of seven stories a day, of approximately 500 words each, which works out to 105,000 words per month. That’s a rather large novel. We have to personally respond to over 200 story submissions, deal with reader inquiries, and promote the magazine. And that’s in addition to actually editing and publishing a new short story every day. All that simply would not be possible without a huge administrative back-end written by webmaster Steven Smethurst. Stories are automatically filtered, formatted, and e-mailed at the press of a button. Thanks to his work, Camille and I have been able to focus on what really counts – editing good stories.

There have been some ups and downs. In September, slush reader Scott Cosby left us for health reasons, and we lost another reader to the pressures of life. Though we’ve since had great readers like Davina Colpman and Hillary Degani step to the plate, there were some hairy moments there when we thought we might drown under a tide of slush. We were very nearly victims of our own success. Still, despite the work load, in November 2008, we managed to help launch Every Day Poets, our sister magazine headed by Managing Editor Oonah V Joslin with support from Nicholas Ozment and Constance Brewer, and though there have been a few bugs, the launch has been mostly successful. We now have the technology ( if not the manpower ) to launch several magazines if someone were to step forward and volunteer to head them.

In recent years, many more ezines have sprung up. From magazines like Residential Aliens, run on a shoestring by Lyn Perry, to British magazine The Pigmy Giant, it is now evident that all one needs to start a successful ezine is blogging software and a will to give back to the short fiction community. Is this a good thing? I can’t help but go back to the comparison to the music business I made earlier. In our analogy, large short fiction venues take on the role of music labels. They are threatened, but able to survive given a willingness to adapt to the new medium. Authors, on the other hand, especially new authors, are likened to independent musicians. Since the days of Napster, new bands like State of Shock and Fall Out Boy have been able to get their message out through online sources. All of a sudden, these bands are getting fans as far away as Vietnam. Such is the advantage in publishing online.

EDF has offered an opportunity to authors to gain exposure from a large audience. Their short story has become an ad for their writing, the try-before-you-buy free sample that gets readers hooked on their work. We’ve had reports of authors getting eight hundred click-throughs to their web pages on the day their story goes live at EDF.

Though its exponential growth has slowed, EDF continues to gather new readers. People want to be a part of a successful venture, and we are exploring further avenues to attract investment in order to increase our rates. We see growth through partnership with traditional book publishers, and through growing our forums.

This book represents the very best of our first year in operation, and we hope it will eventually become a collectors’ item. You are welcome to read it straight through, or to pick it up, open it to a random story, and let it take you away for a couple of minutes. Such is the power of flash fiction.

Jordan Lapp is the managing editor of Every Day Fiction.  He is a member of both the Codex and Spec 24 writing groups. He recently won first place in the prestigious Writers of the Future contest. In 2007, he decided to combine his love of blogging with his passion for fiction and became a founding member of Every Day Fiction.  He blogs at http://www.jordanlapp.com/withoutreallytrying/. 

As the webmaster for Every Day Fiction, I am in charge of keeping the website up and running, adding new features, and trying to make the whole process as easy as possible for the authors, the slush readers, and Jordan and Camille.

One of the first problems that we had was the validation of email addresses. The problem was that we had no validation. Whatever a user submitted in the email address field would be stored as plain text. This became a huge problem as we started sending out acceptance and rejection emails, only to have them bounce off of invalid email addresses. We had no other way of contacting these authors. Our only hope was that they would contact us looking for a status update on their submitted stories. In our first month, there were thirteen invalid email addresses, and only three of those authors contacted us about the status of their stories. The other ten? Apparently they didn’t care if their stories were accepted or not. We added email validation at the end of the first week and haven’t had a problem since.

Twenty-nine days after we launched the site, we got hit by one of the larger social media sites called Stumble Upon. We went from a meager 200 unique visitors a day to a whopping 7000 unique visitors overnight. We were pretty excited – was this the start of a snowballing effect? Did our little site get discovered that fast? The Stumble Upon spike only lasted about 48 hours, and our average readers per day only increased by about 40 over the normal increase. Plus, it broke a bunch of features that I had added to the site, or “stress-tested” them as Jordan described it. Over the next year we got hit by many different social sites. A normal site visitor’s average read time is about three to five minutes. An average Stumble Upon reader stays on our site for about eight seconds on average, Digg users stay for about 25 seconds, and visitors from Delicious stay for about two to three minutes. We came to the conclusion that yes, these big social sites do bring a lot of traffic all at once, but not many – if any – of the users stay.

About four months after we started this project, I added the star rating system to the stories. We needed a way of getting measurable user feedback on the stories. We decided to keep the system open so that anyone could vote without creating an account, to encourage more people to vote on stories, and we also put in a safeguard to prevent people from voting multiple times from the same computer. The system worked smoothly and is still in its original form today.

Originally, we hosted the site with a cheap, overselling host that I had an account on that I wasn’t using any more. It was already paid for by an older project and seemed like a decent way of saving a few bucks. We were wrong. We wasted countless hours dealing with the host’s problems. Faulty hardware on their servers caused constant downtime, arbitrary restarts and database roll backs, with horrible email-only tech support that took days to respond to any email that I sent them. If I could go back and do one thing differently, it would have been to pay the extra money and get a good host from the start. Lesson learned – don’t cheap out on a web server.

When we first started talking about our concept for a daily online flash fiction magazine, I was expecting it to take about 40 hours to set up, with maybe two to three hours of maintenance every month after that. But after the first month I found myself spending eight hours at work then coming home and spending another five hours working on the site. Jordan and Camille were reading about 300 stories a month and providing personal responses to each and every story. I don’t know how they were able to keep up with the slush, but they did an excellent job. Their average response time was 10-15 days during the first year. My weekly website workload has now dropped to 10 hours a week, but it took a lot of effort to get to that point.

Near the end of the first year, we started feeling the weight of Every Day Fiction’s demands – the price of success. We started automating everything we possibly could behind the scenes, and Jordan and Camille began a search for volunteer slush readers. We were lucky enough to find Davina Colpman and Hillary Degani, who are both doing an excellent job. The website is a lot more manageable now, and the ongoing flow of fantastic stories from talented authors makes every bit of the work worthwhile.

It’s been a great learning experience, and a true labour of love.

Steven Smethurst first started web design in 2002 by creating simple HTML manuals as a hobby. At first his code was very primitive, but he kept looking at what others did and learning from them. Over time, he found that he had a real knack for web design and his skills grew as he needed to fullfil requirements for new projects. In late 2006, he found himself doing more web sites than utilities and made the mental switch from calling himself a programming monkey to calling himself a web monkey. He reads mainly short Sci-Fi such as Philip K. Dick, and older story books like The Arabian Nights and the Brothers Grimm.