Tag Archives: Flash Fiction

The Great Storm

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Photo by Lura Helms from Madison Wood’s site

The horned skull stared blankly from within the crook of a tangled oak.
“On the night of the Great Storm, livestock was swept up and hurled all over these woods,” my father said. “Cars…..trucks……”
We passed skeletons of twisted iron, and teenagers wrestling a blackened elm for the radiator grill lodged at its heart.
Kneeling down, his eyes met mine. “You got angry, son.  I understand.”
I stared back.
“I was angry too – when your mother died… ” He stumbled over the words. “But all this …“
“It won’t happen again, Father.”
He suppressed a shudder as I spun the Vortex quietly between my palms.
“Good lad.”

 

All constructive criticism gratefully received.

The Rot

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Friday Fictioneers Madison Woods

image    Madison Woods

In the end, destroying all traces was simple.

Spores introduced at midnight erupted with milky white tendrils and swiftly penetrated the ancient timbers.

By dawn, their sickly flowers swelled to produce bulbous fruit the colour of angry midsummer roses. And in the midday sun, those fruits burst, disgorging a sickly yellow fluid ripe with seed, and rank with the sweat of decay.

This in turn attracted the little things. Those creatures which burrow and bite and chew, thriving on the rot of life.  Nature’s housekeepers.

The first cracks appeared late afternoon.

By dusk, their house was gone.

 

 

I would love critique on any and all stories, so feel free to comment.

 

How to make my writing better?

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“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”

Albert Einstein.

E=mc² Einstein

 image by Binlid at imcool.co.uk

I’m not good at asking for help, but I’ve reached a point in my writing where I can’t move forward without it.

Apart from an LSJ course on Writing for Children (which was excellent), no one has ever critiqued my work. I don’t belong to a writers’ group and I don’t have critique partners, but I also don’t have a completed manuscript, so to be fair, I was concentrating my efforts on that.

Here’s the problem: for the last few weeks I’ve been posting short flash fiction stories to the Writer Unboxed site for their summer competition. This was a big step, no one apart from the tutor at LSJ had ever read my work. And I had ‘beginners luck’ I think, as the first posting got an honourable mention, but the thing is, I’ve been posting every week since then, and I’m just not getting any better, or even equalling that first success, and I don’t know why.

My goal is to write novels, and I appreciate that short stories (and you don’t get much shorter than flash fiction) are a different medium entirely. But I should still be able to see where I’m going wrong.

Maybe I’m bad at editing – when I read the stories over, I don’t know what’s missing, but I’m clearly not connecting with the readers or the judges. If anything, I’m getting less ‘likes’ each week I enter.

There are a couple of my stories that I don’t like myself, in retrospect, but others I still do. And this isn’t about wanting to win the competition, it’s about spotting a problem and just not knowing how to fix it.

And then I thought about an episode of The Big Bang Theory I’d seen, where Sheldon quoted Einstein’s definition of insanity. Click here for a clip from the same episode, but not the actual quote, which is so good, you’re getting it again –

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results

 

I don’t want to be that person, it strikes me as such a huge waste of time, (I barely have enough of that as it is!), so I need to ask for help.

I’ve decided to reach out to a couple of other bloggers and see if they know of any competitions or other online forums where I can submit work and where feedback is encouraged.

I’ll let you know how I get on.

And if you’re aware of any such places out on the Web, could you let me know?

 

 

Flirting with Flash Fiction

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I’m a newbie when it comes to Flash Fiction, but the lure of a quick writing fix got the better of me last week.

Writer Unboxed announced its ‘7 Sizzling Sundays of Summer Flash Fiction’ contest, for stories up to 250 words, and the idea of finishing something, actually finishing something, and someone else reading it… was irresistible.

I rattled off a story in response to this prompt.

by Debbie Ridpath Ohi

That was it. My teeny tiny tale was out there. To be read by strangers. Yikes!

But a couple of hours later I checked the site, and I had 1 Like!  I was so chuffed, I wrote another one and put that up there too.

There are no plans to divorce my current manuscript, we’re in it for the long haul, but times have been hard of late, so I think I can forgive myself for this brief and satisfying dalliance.

And maybe… who knows…I might have another fling next week.

Update 

I got an Honourable mention in the 7 Sizzling Sundays of Summer Flash Fiction competition!

I really loved the story by Gail Mackenzie-Smith, which was one of the winners last week. Link to that story here.