Flash Fiction Chronicles

I’ve gotten out of the habit of writing new pieces from the word-crumbs for writer-pigeons, and a few days ago I decided to give it another go – get back in the habit, as it were. As I reached the end of the exercise, I thought the process might make a decent entry here. So I’m going to give you a walkthrough.

First came the prompts. I copy and paste them, and then add the quote – and I stare at them until I get a thought. (if one doesn’t come, I play Bejeweled until one does.) I add thoughts or definitions or phrases about the words beside them – it looks like this when I’m done:

- TIN ROOF (rusted, cat on a hot)
- AVON LADY (avon calling)
- REFINEMENT (improvement)
- MOP CLOSET (narrow)
- LEAK (drip, pass through)
- AFFECTED (influenced)
- PULCHRITUDE (beauty)
- MACARONI (elbow pasta)
- LAME BRAINED (foolish)
- CURVY (rounded)

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time. –Henry Louis Mencken

 quote thoughts: Immorality. Sin. the roaring 20s. regular hausfrau dreaming of better times, better romance, etc.
her life – leak, mop closet, ornaments out of macaroni, avon lady, tin roof …
dream life – refinement, affected, pulchritude, curvy
Margaret – sensible name, sensible husband – Michael, sensible house. dreams of more, reads romance novels – the historic kind, where men have accents and write notes extolling their lady-love’s pulchritude. She’d had to look that one up, but wasn’t it a nice way to say a girl was pretty?
she is much older, kids are grown, it’s just her and Michael now. He still works, wouldn’t know what to do with himself if he didn’t, still won’t let her – she took in mending, once, when times were tough and the babies were little, but as soon as things were better she had to stop – hurt his pride, he’d say, having a wife he couldn’t support.

From there I generally have a picture of the story, or at least a start. I begin writing, working in the phrases with the prompt words. I add. I delete. I learn more about the character and change things. This is the “finished” product:

Margaret wiped the sweat from her forehead with the same rag she had been using to wipe down the leaky pipe under the sink so she could see where to fix it. Lady Wintercourt wouldn’t have had to fix a pipe, she thought to herself, beginning the complicated process of hauling herself to her feet. Winter’s Heat lay on the side table in the living room, next to her cigarettes and Pepsi, and if she was lucky she’d get to the end of this chapter before Michael was home expecting dinner.

She put the mop in the empty bucket and put the bucket back in the mop closet, then leaned on the counter until she caught her breath. Age was nipping at her heels, and the face in the mirror was no longer the fresh beauty that had graduated at the top of her refinement classes. Margaret imagined Lady Wintercourt in all of her curvy glory, gasping for breath, and how Lord Darien would be entranced by her heaving bosoms …

“Cor,” she scolded herself. “Such nonsense.” She smiled at her own foolishness, and went back to her reclining chair. Oh, for a time when her own bosoms would heave fetchingly, and some Lord would send her a handwritten note about how he was so affected by her pulchritude that he could scarcely sleep. She’d had to look pulchritude up in her son’s dictionary, but wasn’t it a fancy way to say a woman was pretty? Michael hadn’t called her naught but lovely since she was a new bride, and he called her pot roast lovely.

Oh, Michael loved her, she knew. He provided for her, refusing to let her work when he could support her. She had done a brief tour as an Avon Lady, back when times were tight and the babies were small, but he had asked her to stop just as soon as they were back on their feet. It hurt his pride, he said, people thinking he couldn’t take care of his own. Margaret had liked getting out and talking to the ladies, but she quit because he asked her to.

So now she stayed home, keeping things tidy and reading her romance novels and showing Michael that returned his love by making sure there was a hot meal on the table when he got home from work. Sometimes she rang her sister just to chat, but she didn’t want to be a bother – Martha’s girls were still at home, and such a handful. Her own boys called every Sunday. They were working over in the States now, and she couldn’t be prouder.

Margaret lifted up her readers from the beaded chain around her neck, and tucked into Winter’s Heat again. Her own adventures, sensible as they were, were over – but there were at least three more Wintercourt novels at the public library waiting for her.

Now, the important thing about this exercise is not the fact that I hate the piece (which I do). It’s crap, and we all know it. Say it with me, kids. LESSON NUMBER ONE: The First Draft of Anything Is Crap.

No – the important thing about the exercise is what I can take away from it, and even more importantly, what I SHOULD take away from it.

I could clean this up. I could contrive a “real” plot, or at least a believable one, and squish the words like PlayDoh until they fit the mold I had made.

Or, I could identify what would make it possible for the story to be reworked, and just save that piece.

Margaret is what works for me. I like her, I can see her so clearly, I know her whole life. (and while she reminds me a bit of Shirley Valentine, she is still her own person.) I get her husband, too, what motivates him and how much he loves his wife and how little he knows how to show it. These people, this relationship – this is what clicks.

As I have said before, people are what work for me. Characters. I collect them in my memory, I have mental boxes full of habits and traits and situations and experiences and sometimes complete people. Every now and then, one of them will move to the forefront, and that’s when the archaeology dig begins – I catch the tip of something larger out of the corner of my eye, and slowly brush away the bits that aren’t relevant until all that remains is the story. But 90% of the time, it starts with the character.

And characters are born of exercises like this – even exercises that are wildly, irredeemably terrible. So I have tucked Margaret and Michael (and even Lady Wintercourt and her heaving bosoms) away, and when they’re ready to tell their story, I’ll be ready to write it down.

In the mean time, I’ll work on today’s prompts – you never know what might come of it.

Previously published at Blogging in the Dark

TL.Schofield lives in central GA with a white dog and a black cat – one of which she is allergic to. Her second published piece is currently posted at AlienSkin Magazine.  She is getting back into the swing of things after a holiday hiatus, and blogs about the writing process  at Blogging in the Dark.

BY NIK PERRING

reprinted with permission from Nik’s Blog, January 26, 2010

I am not an expert on short stories. I’m not an expert on anything to be honest. But I am a short story writer, one who’s been published in some fairly spiffing places, and one who teaches writing every so often.

It occurred to me earlier that I don’t really give any advice here, so this post should change that. It’s not comprehensive. Lots will disagree with me, I’m sure. But this is what I think. I hope it helps. And if anyone’s got any of their own I’d love to see them – so do leave a comment.

Here are my tips for anyone wanting to write a good short story or piece of flash fiction.

Start where the story starts, not before. If I was telling you about a fantastic hotel room I’d stayed in I wouldn’t start by telling you about booking the tickets to get there (unless the story was about booking the tickets and ended in the room).

Take out everything, every word, every sentence, every character that isn’t absolutely necessary.

Similarly, only use the right words. Sometimes people do just ’sit’. Or ‘run’.

Make sure your characters are believable. What they do, or the situations they find themselves in, may be unlikely and fantastical but the way they react to them has to be something that readers will believe.

Be suspicious of anything you think is clever. The story comes first, the story’s what people should notice, not the writer.

Write for you, but spare a thought for the reader too.

Don’t overdo it. Big words are fine if they’re the right ones. Same with descriptions.

Say what you want to say in the simplest, and most effective, way possible. In other words: get to the point.

Aim to be brilliant.

Don’t expect it to be easy. Or quick. Be prepared to work hard.

Don’t be afraid of rewriting. In fact, embrace it; it will make your stories better.

Don’t expect to get it right the first time. You have total control of what can be changed. (I often find also that if a story wants or needs to be changed, then it’ll let you know.)

Trust your instincts. If you suspect something’s not working then it probably isn’t.

Don’t be afraid of putting a story away for a while. Sometimes stories, and your head, need space.

Don’t be afraid of failure. Nothing’s wasted. It’s better to try something new and fail (and perhaps learn something) than to play safe all the time.

Most importantly: BE BRAVE. You have an imagination, use it. Write the story you want to write, write what you think’s good and interesting, even if that means not sticking with the norm. Different, if done well, can be brilliant.

And read the greats. See how they do things. See why they’re the greats.

Nik Perring is a writer and workshop leader from the UK. His short stories have been published widely, in places including Smokelong Quarterly, 3: AM Magazine, Ballista, Word Riot and Metazen. His debut collection of short, short stories will be published by Roast Books in the summer. He’s also the author of a children’s book and occasional non-fiction. Nik blogs here . 

The question I’m most asked is, “What is flash fiction?” It is often, according to Google Insights for Search, one of the top searches associated with flash.

Imagine a reader picking you up, pressing you against a wall, demanding the truth of what you know. Never lose the feel of wall against your spine, the urgency of the demand for something real, the grip of the reader around your neck. Imagine there are only so many words. Imagine there’s but one way to tell it,  a single word fit for each slot.

Imagine the moment you begin, the flash desires its ending; imagine the flash holds you responsible so that the tiniest things matter, so nothing burns without purpose. Imagine that reader slapping you time and time again, saying, “No, that ain’t it.” Imagine trying to tell this reader, the one lifting you up, grasping your breath, pressed against your chest, about something trite. (Notice how wrong trite is for this slot, how it ruins things in the worst of ways, how a different word might make it all rite/right.). Imagine you can’t get away without confrontation, without finding something to satisfy the need for meaning in a world gone ephemeral, out of time, where all its words have lost power to convey the real.

Imagine even the title matters. Imagine it captures the back story, implies the aftermath, hints at subtext, works its way into the flash itself. Imagine, out of nothingness, there’s flash. Imagine a world without its history, without its dreams, its flashbacks. Imagine you tell a story like that,  in that moment, nothing beyond it, except maybe that title, like the truth of Rosebud, something denied the piece itself, given only to its readers.

Imagine that you were born to write flash, to work in the crampest of spaces, to compress narrative the way the universe was once compressed into the tiniest of spots, so much so that time did not exist. Imagine you write not about the explosion itself, but the moment before, the world after. Imagine you write flash because there’s no time left to write anything else but.

What is flash? It is a machine of compression, a mindset—that desire to make the most minute of movements matter. It is fiction that cannot tolerate uncertainty for but a moment, so it rushes to its ending before it loses nerve. It’s fearlessness in the face of insignificance. Your own “Attention must be paid” in a world that no longer holds any. It’s the urge to get it all down and then to move on quickly to something else. That madness of a room covered in scribbled notes, the kind stuck in bottles and floated on oceans.

What is flash? It’s a very tiny thing that doesn’t want to be anything else. It has jammed you into a hall, shoved you against it, demanded you fill the nothing of space with something uncontainable. Micro. Sudden. Flash. Fiction.  Imagine this is what you were made for. And then get to it, before nothing’s left to say.

Randall Brown teaches at and directs Rosemont College’s MFA in Creative Writing and Graduate English programs. He is the author of the award-winning (very) short fiction collection Mad To Live and his essay appears in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction. He recently served as the Lead Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. His work has been published widely, both on line and in print. He can be reached at http://randalldouglasbrown.blogspot.com/.

For the week of February 7 through February 14, Flash Fiction Chronicles is  having its second String-of-10 Contest—String of 10 TWO—for the best 250-word story written from a specific prompt: a series of ten words given to you on February 7, 2010.

JOEL WILLANS, nominated for the Pushcart Prize and winner of the Yeovil Prize and Global Short Story Award  is our guest judge for this contest.  Find out more about Joel BELOW.

 GUIDELINES

1. Read the contest’s String of 10 Writing Prompt which will be available at 12:01 on February 7, 2010 here as well as on the FFC Daily Prompt Page and at Gay Degani’s Author Thread at Every Day Fiction. 
2. The contest is open to stories of  up to 250 words. Entries over the word limitation will be disregarded.
3. Submit via email addressed to flashfictionblog@everydayfiction.com.   All entries must be copy and pasted into the body of the email. No attachments will be opened.
4. There is no entry fee.
5. You may enter as many 3 separate and different stories up to 250-words each. 
6. All stories must contain at least four words from the String of 10.  Any stories without at least four words from the string of 10 will be disregarded.  The prompt words may be slightly modified such as tense, number, etc.  (Example: walk can be amended to walks, walked, even walker or walkers)
7. The aphorism that is given doesn’t not need to be found in the story, but rather to be used as an additional source of inspiration.  No story will be judged on its use.  Note may be taken if a story uses the aphorism in an inspired way.
8. What matters most is your story, not the prompt words or quotation.  Seamless integration of any four of the prompt words is the goal. 
9. All entries must be in English, original, unpublished, and not submitted or accepted elsewhere at the time of submission. Flash Fiction Chronicles/Every Day Fiction/Every Day Publishing reserves one-time publication rights to the 1st- through-3rd winning entries to be published at Every Day Fiction and Flash Fiction Chronicles.
10. Entries must be received via email by 11:59 PDT Sunday, February 14.
11. Winners will be notified by March 20.  Publication will follow in April. 
12. The preliminary decision the judges of the top 10 and the final decision by guest judge, Joel Willans, of the top three stories are final.

 Stories from the first String-of-10 Contest can be read at these links.

 1^st Place: The Haircut by Sharon E. Trotter

2^nd Place: The Forever Summer by Mary J. Daley

3^rd Place: Choices Made by Jim O’Loughlin

PRIZES

1st Place: Winner will have his or her story published at Every Day Fiction in April 1010 and be paid the standard payment of $3.00 per story.   A copy of The Best of Every Day Fiction TWO along with a copy of Pomegranate Stories by Gay Degani, the editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles  will also be awarded as well as an “I Write Every Day” t-shirt.

2nd and 3rd Place: Winners will have their stories published at Flash Fiction Chronicles in April.  (NOTE:There is no payment for publication at Flash Fiction Chronicles.)  A copy of The Best of Every Day Fiction TWO along with a copy of Pomegranate Stories by Gay Degani, the editor of Flash Fiction Chronicles  will also be awarded to both 2nd and 3rd place winners.

 ABOUT JOEL WILLANS

Originally from Suffolk in the UK, Joel Willans has lived in Canada, Finland and Peru. A copywriter and travel blogger, he now gallivants between East Anglia, Helsinki and Spain. Joel’s stories have been broadcast on BBC radio and published in more than a dozen anthologies and many magazines. In 2008, he was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and won the Yeovil Prize and Global Short Story Award. “By ma biscuit or kiss ma fish”, his short story collection, is currently shortlisted for the Scott Prize, while his flash fiction can be found at places like Prick-of-the Spindle, Pank, Word Riot and Boston Literary Magazine. His story “One Bright Moment” is Every Day Fiction’s most popular story of all time.

I’m a relative newcomer to the writing scene, and it was my discovery of the online flash-fiction world that really prodded me into action.  I found one litmag, and then another, and so on until it all spiralled out of control and I was spending countless hours reading these hundreds of short-short stories, trying to figure out how the writers had managed to do so much in such a tiny space.  It was both gob-smacking and inspiring. 

The concision and the immediacy of flash fiction seemed to me to be something attainable and manageable, unlike the weave and sprawl of a novel, and so I decided to try my hand at it.  I’ve had a certain amount of success,  but, of course,  it’s a hell of a lot trickier than it looks, which only adds to my admiration for the writers who get it right.  Although I’ve a long way to go, the learning curve has been satisfyingly and exhaustingly steep, and each rejection slip teaches me something.

So that’s the short of it, but I wasn’t happy to leave it there: this September I enrolled upon an MA in creative writing, with the intention of hammering out a draft of a novel, or as much of one as I can manage in a year.  From the micro to the macro, then, in one demented leap. 

Novels were my first love as a reader, and it’s an enduring passion; so as much as I enjoy reading and writing flashes, I also want to make one of those bigger, fatter, monolithic chunks of prose, and the MA seemed like a good place to start.

The initial feedback on my workshopped pieces were much as you’d expect; coming from the get-to-the-point precision of flash fiction, all I was getting on my sample chapters was ‘Flesh it out!  Give me exposition!  Show us more setting!’  Next time round this turned to ‘You’re just rambling!  What’s the point of this?  Get to the action!’ 

So I’ve had to sit down and examine my approach, and the trick, as far as I can see right now (one semester in, three months wiser!) is to take everything you’ve learned from writing flashes, and apply it at a deeper level.  That sounds a little crazy, and it’s possible I’ve overdosed on mulled wine (it is the festive season, after all), but in flash fiction – as we know – every word has to work extremely hard and pack in a world’s worth of meaning, and so it seems more permissible and tempting, somehow, in a longer piece, to slack off when you know you’ve got the wiggle-room to elaborate and wander around the topic.  But of course that’s not so – the reader is a critical beast, and you’ve got to maintain their interest over a much greater span than, say, five hundred words.

What I think is needed, then, is to write everything in more close detail than you might in a flash – describe the room, detail the childhood, fill in the backstory, or whatever – but do this with every bit of precision and concision that you can pull from your flash fiction bag of tricks.  Flesh it out, give the reader the wealth of detail that makes a novel such a sumptuous treat, but always treat every single paragraph, every line of dialogue, as though it has to be accountable for itself, as though it has to be read aloud and examined as an entity onto itself.  It may not stand alone, plot-wise, but its language and structure and resonance should be as strong as any five hundred or two hundred word flash fiction piece that you’d ever consider subbing to a competition or a journal.

Now let’s see if I can practice what I preach, eh?

Valerie O’Riordan is an Irish writer based in Manchester, England, currently studying creative writing at the University of Manchester.  She blogs at Not Exactly True.

Editor’s note: Today is Kevin Shamel’s birthday.  Happy Birthday, Kev!

Flash fiction made me a better novelist. Novella-ist? Well, anyway…

I found flash while wandering the shadowy paths of publishing short stories. It was like stumbling out of an enchanted forest and into neat rows of juicy little fruit trees. I knew I could grow some tasty stories like that. By the time I’d had my fifth or sixth flash fiction story published, I was an amateur orchard-grower. I spent a year writing lots of flash. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write. Soon enough, I was producing juice. (I later fermented it all and got everyone drunk, but that’s another story entirely.)

A majority of the writers I know—and I know more writers than I know other kinds of people—have never attempted flash fiction. Most of them haven’t thought much about it. Of the people I casually speak to about writing flash that have not done so, most really don’t think much of the art. It’s because they’ve not explored it.

The common misconception about flash fiction is that it’s an easy thing to write. It’s a thousand words or less. I can write that in ten minutes. That is true. In fact, I’ve had stories published that I wrote in ten minutes. (Keep in mind that I also write publishable novellas in under two weeks, and I’m writing one soon that will be written in three days. It’s not the “normal” way of doing it.) It’s not unheard of to whip out an amazing bit of flash in no time at all. However, it’s not uncommon to spend days, weeks, or months getting a flash story just right.

That’s because it’s an art-form. It has to be mastered. When you’ve got it figured out, it’s a skill you can draw upon for the rest of your authoring life.

By learning how to write a complete story with such a small word count, I learned to cut my story to its quick. I learned about what words are really necessary for the story. I learned that a great number of people prefer to read stories that are lean and to the point. I honed my sentences and cut out all the extras that took the story (and the reader) somewhere beyond the point of it all. I learned how to make my stories shoot straight to the heart of the reader. I learned to edit.

My year of writing flash helped me to find my true writing style. One that is fortunately in synch with the world today. I write books that can be read in the time it takes to watch a movie. People like that. In fact, they love that. How many people spend fifteen hours watching a movie? Do you push pause after watching for fifteen minutes and go to work? Are movies two hundred hours long? No. People like the idea of complete, satisfying, lasting stories that they can digest quickly. Stories like flash fiction.

Because of flash, my longer works are leaner and quicker. Because of flash, it’s easier to make a story something that people will read straight through because they don’t have a moment to stray from the story. Because of flash, I had a book published.

In the toppling forest of the publishing industry, there is new growth. I urge anyone growing giant Sequoias of novels to consider spending a year learning the art of pruning flash fiction bonsais. In no time we’ll have acres and acres of shady rows of producing trees. Then we can feed the world our fruits.

Or get them all drunk on apple cider.

Kevin Shamel lives in the Pacific Northwest in a house that was once surrounded by apple orchards. You can find his flash at Every Day Fiction. His first book, Rotten Little Animals, can be read on a long commute or on a flight to Maui (it has been done). Visit ShamelessCreations for art, words, and shameless weirdness.

So it’s November again, and that means that since it is already November 16th, many of us aspiring novelists are knee deep in NaNo.

It’s hard to believe that there are many authors out there that are at least not peripherally aware of this seminal masochistic endeavor, but for the sake of clarity, I’ll summarize: Between November 1st and November 30th an author makes a dedicated effort to hack out an entire novel of 50k. Whoa, that’s a lot of words, right? It’s quite a few, yes, but broken down that’s only 1666 words a day. Within reach for most of us, even with families and jobs.

The idea here is volume, anyway, not quality — although the rules do allow for you create notes, character bibles, plot outlines or whatever esoteric voodoo you might practice. I don’t do any of that, and don’t know anybody that does. (But hey, I live in a small world.) NaNo is really about writing on a schedule, about letting go of your preconceived ideas about what writing well means. It really is quite liberating to be excused from over-thinking every scene and every line of dialog. The end result will almost certainly be a raw and rough bit of fiction, but don’t let that stop you, with a little work you just may have something worth sending out to a lucky agent or publisher.

As a quite biased example: my 2007 run at NaNo landed me a contract with BeWrite Books, an awesome European indie press. My book should be available as a paperback before the end of the year. That book is called The Movie, and I hope everyone will buy, borrow, or beg a copy, it’s a fun story about hopes and dreams, and bad science fiction. Of course, as nearly all my stories, it’s  really about ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

Okay, okay, you are saying, I’ll buy the book when it comes out, (Thanks!) but what does NaNo have to do with flash fiction of all things? Flash fiction is just the opposite of NaNo. Well, to that, I assert the definitive reply of: well, yes and no. I’ve done NaNo in 2007, 2008, and 2009. And each and every time I can recall exactly how my work with flash fiction paid off to get these manuscripts written.

2007: The Movie

This was actually the third novel manuscript I wrote, and I was terribly intimated by length, and still wasn’t really sure I could write a novel manuscript that wasn’t painful to read. So I said to myself,  Bosley you’ve written a few short stories, you know a bit about character arcs, and motivation, and conflict. Just set a goal for your protagonist and make sure he can reach it if he works hard enough. (Who likes a lazy protag?) So that’s easy enough, I said to myself … but it kind of wasn’t easy. Nope. Not for Bosley.

So I came up with the idea to put bits of a meta-story in the book, as a kind of way to refresh the readers perspective and hopefully distract myself long enough to forget I was writing a very long novel manuscript. In this case the meta-story was scenes from my protagonists fancy-pants movie script. And can you guess? Yep, those scenes are essentially flash fiction. I’m not so sure I would have finished the novel if I hadn’t been able to look forward to writing these silly little stories within the bigger story. Not only was it fun for me, it allowed me to indirectly communicate the protagonist’s thoughts at a personal level. (We are what we write, right?) If  I hadn’t taken the time to learn the craft of flash fiction, the manuscript would have had much less impact, me thinks.

2008: Americana: The Last Gleaming

I actually punted on this manuscript and finished up at 30k. So I lost the NaNo that year. But I ran out of story, and happily finished it up at its natural stopping place. This story is about Drake Carson, a detective in the final stages of dementia who is chasing the Misfit, believed to be evil incarnate. Drake is a good guy even if he is insane. This story proper is actually 6 intertwined short stories/vignettes. How were  are they intertwined, Bosley? You might ask.  Flash fiction, naturally. What all the stories have in common are a series short flashbacks and self-contained scenes that describe the Misfit’s previous crimes and evil deeds.

These bits, essentially flash fiction, are the unifying force that holds the main story arc together. I’m on the second draft at the moment, so I’m not sure how well the final manuscript will actually work. But I am certain that this is 30k I wouldn’t have written if I hadn’t been able to look forward to those the ‘breather pieces’.

2009: Sweet Lies

There is less to say about this story since I’m only about 20k into it. But the first thing I did is find some method to my madness. In this case, Howie, a young murderous sociopath, has a tendency to deflect any serious thoughts by telling bizarre and surreal stories about his past. Not only does this keep others from thinking to hard about his actions, but it keeps himself from doing the same. What sort of bizarre and surreal stories? you might ask — right! What amounts to flash fiction. Good job. :p

I might even go so far as to cite upcoming novel, Servant of the Mud with Shadowfire Press as using that same technique of embedding mini-stories in story. This an urban fantasy with some tiny chapters woven into the larger story. These chapters attempt to show the more human side of the antagonist (despite not being human). It allows the reader to feel at least some sympathy to what would otherwise might be a kind of cardboard villain. Of course, these tiny chapters bear a great deal of resemblance to flash fiction.

So while flash fiction might seem tiny and insignificant next to a novel of even 50k, if one looks carefully enough it becomes clear that flash fiction can become another ingredient in a beautiful soup of words that perhaps someday will become a published novel.

And for those of you doing NaNo this year, come join me. It’s really not too late.  You’ve got almost half a month left!  Enough time to write half a novel.  And if you are sitting this one out. No sweat, there’s one every year. And keep in mind that the Office and Letters and Light needs money to continue doing what they do. If you can spare couple of bucks, why not make a donation?

Saddly, as a postscript, I’ll say that I am a couple of days behind in NaNo, but I have a very good excuse.  His name is Luke Fredrick Dean.  We’ve taken him home on purely trial basis, but after some discussion with my wife, she seems intent on keeping him despite his prodigal efforts to eat us out of house and home.  And, I’m told the grace period for returns is a measly five days.  So it seems he will need to board with us for the next twenty odd years.

Until next post … ciao.

Bosley Gravel, eclectic hack of an author, was born in the Midwest, and came of age in Texas and southern New Mexico. He writes in a variety of genres. His fiction focuses on the absurdly tragic, and the tragically absurd. He likes good black coffee, nightmares, Billie Holiday, and that hour just before the sun comes up.  You can find links to his flash fiction, short stories, novels, and other credits and affiliations at http://www.ripcot.com.

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.

Congratulations to Mary J. Daley for her story “The Forever Summer.” 

She placed second in The Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Contest held in August.  The challenge was to write a piece of short fiction, 250 words or less, using at least four of the following prompt words: 

 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*  

THE FOREVER SUMMER
by  Mary J. Daley

He had seventy-nine tattoos from his ankles to the nape of his neck. All declaring the same thing, “Wanda Forever.” Wanda’s sense of fun had started it. On the twenty-first day of June she approached him and said,  “I’ll let you bed me on one condition.”

He happily left her bed two hours later for the tattoo parlor.

He loved her immediately.  She stood four foot four and had long golden hair streaked with black that she refused to touch with clip, elastic or brush. She smelled of ripened cantaloupe during sex, ate only steam vegetables, and liked her whisky neat.

Wanda blew his summer into all shades of happy, and only asked that he mark each bout of love making with his confirmation that it was forever.
But when autumn came, Wanda refused his touch, even when he stood naked in front of her pointing to her name and his promise that encompassed his body.  She just shook her head and said nothing, and he stood there with seventy-nine tattoos, hoping somehow they would blow back the best summer of his life.

Mary J. Daley lives in Toronto, Canada with her husband and  two daughters. Her short fiction has appeared in Allegory, The Harrow, Gryphonwood ,and Gemini Magazine. 

Third Place was published here at Flash Fiction Chronicles on Wednesday, October 21, 2009 and First Place will be published at Every Day Fiction on Sunday, October 25, 2009.

 *The quotation was also part of the prompt, but there was no requirement to use it in the story.

Congratulations to Jim O’Loughlin for his story “Choices Made.” 

 He placed third in The Flash Fiction Chronicles String-of-10 Contest held in August.  The challenge was to write a piece of short fiction, 250 words or less, using at least four of the following prompt words: 

 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 * 

CHOICES MADE
by Jim O’Loughlin

Later, he would be able to consider all that he had left behind and never saw again: the wedding album, the birth certificates, the kids’ favorite toys, even the laptop.  In the moment though, with the storm surging and blow back peeling off the roof like masking tape, he only had time to grab what he could on the way out.  

Still, even as he ran to the car, dripping sweat and bleeding from the gash in his forehead, with the river already up to the wheel wells, he realized that the choices he had just made said something about who he was.  In his arms, he held a phone book, the cantaloupe that had just turned ripe, and a gallon of milk. And he had made sure to lock the front door.

Jim O’Loughlin’s flash fiction has appeared in Quick Fiction, The Pedestal Magazine, and North American Review.  He is the publisher of Final Thursday Press  at http://www.finalthursdaypress.com.

Second Place will be published here at Flash Fiction Chronicles on Friday, October 23, 2009 and First Place will be published at Every Day Fiction on Sunday, October 25, 2009.

 *The quotation was also part of the prompt, but there was no requirement to use it in the story.