My short fiction has been filling in space while I’m between novels, and it’s been getting some love. The latest pleasant surprise is from my boys at Storgy.com, who have awarded my story, “Sponging” third place in their 2019 Storgy Flash Fiction Competition.
Flash is something I had never tried before. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s the need to tell a complete story in a pitifully small number of words, usually 500 or a thousand depending on who you ask. For this contest, it was 500 words. Flash fiction fans (who also appreciate alliteration, apparently) will tell you it’s a legit art form that forces the writer to focus on only the elements crucial to creating a character and theme, a little like prose haiku. Others will tell you it’s because nobody can afford to do print and paper magazines anymore, and reading long stories on line can be a drag.
Given that I write primarily novels and business books, it’s hard for me to even say hello in 500 words, so the fact I could tell a tale about a fixed horse race and a guilty jockey in such a short space was a little surprising. I couldn’t have done it without the input from my writer’s group, the Thursday night bunch at Sin City Writers.
Truthfully, my goal was to make the book– the top 30 stories are getting published in a chapbook. I never expected to make the top 3 (and a little bird told me I damn near won the thing, but that’s practically irrelevant.) I know and really enjoy the work of several of the authors who submitted, like Tomas Marcantonio, Emily Harrison, Rick White, and Laure Van Rensburg and that’s some durned fine company to find oneself among.
I’ll keep you posted on when the book will be available. Meanwhile, check out all my short stories and where you can find them on this site on the Short Stories and Other Pieces page.
This a fantastic news! What an great achievement. Like you, I can barely say “Hello” using only 500 words. You not only wrote a complete story using only 500 word, but you also won a prize for excellence. M compliments!