Wednesday, May 16, 2012

National Flash Fiction Day

As the clock has just ticked past midnight, I'm afraid you've just missed National Flash Fiction Day...

If case you don't know, flash fiction is, essentially, very short fiction.  There's no accepted definition or stated length, but usually it's fewer than 1000 words.  And it's something the internet gets on board with!


My friend and housemate Mel co-runs a British flash fiction site called The Pygmy Giant, and they've had a competition in honour of the day, inviting flash fiction with the theme 'flash' - and today announced a very worthy winner.  See it here.

I went for the less competitive The Write-In, where every contribution was published.  They had set aside 11am-3pm for people to write flash fiction, inspired by one of the 200 words and phrases which they'd created as prompts.  More info about that here.

The two I chose (and clicking on the prompt takes you to my piece of flash fiction) were 'The Sun Is Not Our Friend' and, for a bit of light relief, 'The Smell of Warm Bread'.  It was fun - and, of course, quick!

Do you read any flash fiction?  By virtue of reading my blog post, I'm going to assume that you're (a) interested in fiction, and (b) not averse to reading things online - but I don't see flash fiction mentioned much in the literary blogosphere.  I hardly ever read it myself - perhaps because I steer fairly clear of modern fiction altogether, but maybe there are other reasons too.  Over to you - do you write it or read it?  What is your opinion of it all?  Or had you simply never heard of it before?


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