Horror Scribes offered an interesting challenge for the end of 2017 – The 12 days of Christmas Horror Flash contest. It was a little hard for me because Christmas is not the sort of thing I want to mess with – and with a limit of 300 words there’s only so much you can do. […]
Read More I am Day 6Join us January 1st for 42 days of flash fiction prompts – on 42 Flash
Read More COMING SOON: 42 FlashIt’s funny, I participate in flash fiction contests where you have anywhere from one hour to one week to write a story and publish it, and yet having a month to write up to three stories for an anthology fills me with dread. I think its partially because with a 24 hour deadline, there’s no time […]
Read More Writing DeadlinesVery insightful!
Read More Spotlight: Lisa CraytonOne of the hardest lessons I’ve learned when it comes to Miro/Flash Fiction is keeping it short without losing the story– or the audience. With flash fiction, I’ve learned that you have to limit the scope of the story and not lose yourself in the subplots and details. I think that’s the first lesson everyone […]
Read More Trying not to lose the readerMaking a backup isn’t always enough – take it from me: go the extra step and make sure a) you’ve backed up what you think you have and b) it actually worked. I’ve just come back from a ‘catastrophic’ failure of my desktop computer. Fortunately I had done a system backup 3 days before it […]
Read More A Serious Word on Backups…We all have a tendency to repeat words and phrases when we’re writing, especially in longer works. One of the tricks to get around this is to write your first draft and then use the thesaurus to correct the problem. Sometimes this solution helps– sometimes it simply changes the problem. I’m in the edit phase […]
Read More Before you use that thesaurus…Today’s prompt at FlashFriday was particularly uninspiring for me, I did have a beginning line, but I had no idea what to do with it. This time, rather than take you through the revision process in detail, I’m going to present the two versions of the story I wrote. The prompt: Did I pick the […]
Read More FlashFriday: Re-imaging a storyAs stated in the overview, emotion, rhythm and meaning are building blocks of poetry. In Part 1 we discussed them in relationship to words, now it’s time to think about their relationship to each other. One of the best examples of this relationship is music. Strip out the lyrics and you are left with rhythm […]
Read More Poetry: Part 2 InterrelationshipsThis story was written for the first “Race the Date” a flash fiction challenge, (a weekly flash fiction contest hosted by Cara Michaels ) The Universal Truth of Time Travel They say that time travel is difficult, if not impossible, but they have never tried to conjugate a verb into the pluperfect-past-participle, present indicative, future […]
Read More Flash Fiction Challenge – Race the Date #1