Flash Fiction Chronicles

I’ve read a lot of online discussion lately that suggests flash fiction stories are quick, easy pieces that you can dash off in a morning. That’s not my experience at all. The only reason I can afford to write flash is that I have a day job.

As an example, I thought I’d describe the process I used to write “Home to Perfect,” a flash piece published in the Best of Every Day Fiction Two anthology. This story took me a solid 15 hours to write. I’ll try to break down how those hours were spent. (The description below assumes you’ve read the story).

I got the idea for the story when I was poking around the Internet one day and found a clip on YouTube of a kid playing “Through the Fire and Flames” perfectly in expert mode on the video game Guitar Hero. At the end of the clip, the kid is visibly trembling, cursing in disbelief, and totally overwhelmed. I found myself thinking over the next several days about the kid’s awe and how he shared it with an audience on YouTube. I wondered if his parents had any idea what that moment meant to him.

I spent about 3 hours over the next several days developing the idea. I asked myself who Vic (my main character) was, why he cared about playing through the song perfectly, and what else was going on in his life. I wrote extensive notes on him, his mom, his dad, and his brother Kurt. This was the point at which I realized that I was writing about domestic violence. I could tell you a lot of details about all of these characters that never made it into the story. I believe a story should be an iceberg–what’s visible should be only a small amount of the material that’s in the author’s possession.

In a flash piece, I look for the iceberg effect even more. In very few words, I have to make the reader aware of significant emotions and history that bear on the scene I chose to show.

At that point, I wrote my first draft, spending about 2 hours on it. (My first draft rate for longer pieces is much faster, but my speed of writing seems to be inversely related to the length of the piece).

I put my first draft down for about a week. When I picked it up again, something was wrong with it, and I couldn’t figure out what. After much rereading and consideration (which I’m not counting towards the total time spent on the work), I figured out that “Through the Fire and Flames” was the problem. I had no emotional connection to the song, and I hadn’t spent much time playing Guitar Hero. I had, on the other hand, pulled many all-nighters playing Rock Band. There’s a song on Rock Band called “Green Grass and High Tides” that I love deeply and find wickedly difficult. I changed the story so that Vic is playing Rock Band, and spent about 5 hours writing a new draft. While I wrote this draft, I listened repeatedly to “Green Grass and High Tides” and periodically took breaks to watch videos on YouTube of people playing this song on Rock Band.

At that point, I thought I’d finished the story, so I let my husband read it. As always happens, he made me realize that I had a lot of work left to do, pointing out several problems with how it was structured. I spent about 3 hours restructuring and fixing those problems. Then, I spent 2 hours doing a final polish and preparing the story for submission. For me, this consists of reading the whole thing out loud several times, fixing anything that trips me up, and fiddling with things until I’m sure I really want to send the story out into the world. I run spellcheck. I obsessively study the guidelines for the market to which I’m sending the story.

And that’s a wrap. I’ve wished that I could write faster, but I’m proud of the piece and am glad I took my time.

The original version of this post appeared as Best of Every Day Fiction on Words, Words, Words.

Erica Naone writes by day about topics related to the Internet and computer software. Her fiction has appeared in On The Premises, Storyglossia, Every Day Fiction and Flashquake. She recently received an honourable mention in the 32nd annual International 3-Day Novel Contest. She lives with her husband in Allston, MA. You can read her blog or follow her on Twitter.

I’m afraid to go into the file cabinet filled with my writing.  My limited organizational abilities have lumped together a score of published pieces with the rejected or unsubmitted orphans that just don’t work.  Either I killed the idea or editors have responded:  “After careful consideration, we’ve decided we won’t be able to use it.” 

And they end with the kiss-off benediction: “We wish you luck in placing it with another publisher.”

Some stories are saved from oblivion by the suggest ion that I rewrite.  One editor wrote, “We loved your story [about dolphins that had adapted to human incursions into their territory] but the last sentence stumped us.”  My chief character finds herself pregnant and the dolphin lover has migrated north to Alaska.  Sorry, Editor, the story hangs on this punch line and I’ll submit the piece elsewhere.

Every Day Fiction’s panoply of sharp-eyed slush-pile readers encouraged me last week to rewrite another piece I thought was pretty good if not perfect.  And I shall rewrite because Camille Gooderham Campbell and company pointed out where my story had gone astray.

No, my difficulty lies in handling the orphan rejects.  Should I cremate them with only a small prayer?  Save them because there may be a plangent phrase or image worth resurrecting?  Shred them to keep my heirs from crowing over my failures?

Wouldn’t it be nice if there were an archive of failed efforts, like Jasper Fforde’s brilliant Well of Lost Plots where all unpublished writing resides?  My flash story “Alien Nation” (read “Alienation”) about a werewolf vegetarian would sit next to Fforde’s “unread and unreadable Caversham Heights, a cliché-ridden pulp mystery.” 

My three novels—begun but never completed—would collect dust until some literary archeologist cried “Eureka!”  And “Gaslighting,” where I poured my heart into a tale of spousal abuse ending with a Halloween murder, would lie comatose.

Or—and this is the germ of an idea—could my orphan stories be posted where struggling writers might find they serve as the perfect prompt needed to re-energize their spirits?  I would get a credit line, much like F. Scott Fitzgerald did when he failed to turn in a satisfactory script for Tender Is the Night.  And the new author, bound for the Elysian heights of publishing, would add insights into the successes and failures of humanity.

Let me think about that before I take out the trash.

Walter Giersbach’s fiction has appeared Bewildering Stories, Big Pulp, Every Day Fiction, Everyday Weirdness, Lunch Hour Stories, Mouth Full of Bullets, Mystery Authors, OG Short Fiction, Northwoods Journal, Paradigm Journal, Short Fiction World, Southern Fried Weirdness, The Short Humour Site and Written Word.  Two volumes of short stories, Cruising the Green of Second Avenue, have been published by Wild Child (www.wildchildpublishing.com).  He also served for three decades as director of communications for Fortune 500 companies.  Walter’s website can be found at http://allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.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.

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.

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/. 

The best flashes come to me after serious hard thinking, following a prompt along its many tangents, discarding the ideas I feel have been done before or would be ‘flat’ on the screen (or page). Eventually, I’ll find a thread I think I can work with, and then I get weaving.
Of course I also get inspiration from reading other stuff, or may want to write a flash that tackles a particular idea or theme. I’ve had tremendous fun writing 250 word flashes around instances of historical crime. Researching some truly grisly or bizarre or just plain boggling crimes and teasing out a scene from in amongst the facts and the mythical stuff that accompanies stories like Lizzie Borden’s. (My flash about Lizzie won the Fish Historical-Crime Award, and will be published online in Yellow Mama, a venue specialising in crime fiction.)

The trick, for me anyway,when writing historical flash is to find a single scene and build it into something compelling enough to feel either very ‘real’ (like you’re there, watching it happen) or very moving (by which I mean it can be disturbing or sickening or pitiable or sad), while at the same time avoiding treading old ground and/or extrapolating too far beyond the evidence which exists on record. This works well for historical flash fiction because the ’story’ (as a whole) often exists in the public domain – you don’t have to build it from scratch – but the fine detail or the pathos or the resonance (the things that give a story substance) are either missing or lost in the annals. By using a title which pins the story down, I have the freedom to work within a defined space to bring the past to life. Assuming I’m lucky enough to get the words down right.

For me, flash fiction is a unique combination of discipline and freedom. I stopped writing flash briefly when I was deep into the first ms of a novel, thinking I couldn’t afford the distraction and needed to dedicate my every available writing hour to the novel. But my writing suffered for it, as did the novel. So I switched to writing a full length crime novel AND doing a flash challenge every week, and the two things were not only compatible they were positively zinging – the one from the other and back again.

Flash is a great way of flexing your writerly muscles. I can’t recommend it enough.

Sarah Hilary is a frequent contributor to Every Day Fiction  (Lolita’s Lynch Mob is an all-time favorite) and on other flash sites around the web.  Check out her blog, Crawl Space, where she lists all her online writing and then check out her other brilliant FLASHES of fiction.  Her most recent piece, Flood Plain, is up at Prick of the Spindle.