Today (Saturday, June 15, 2024) is National Flash Fiction Day (NFFD) in Great Britain. But why relegate the celebration of great short short stories to that blessed plot alone? The web is worldwide, after all, and thanks to the internet, we can all take part.
So let’s take this party global. Happy (Inter)National Flash Fiction Day, everyone!
Continue reading “Flood your feed with fabulous flash on National Flash Fiction Day”Thank you, Bulb culture Collective
In publication news, I’m thrilled that a flash fiction I wrote back in the ‘90s has found a new home! The story, “Baseball 1971,” was published this week in the on line literary magazine Bulb Culture Collective. The site specializes in publishing works that were published previously in journals that no longer exist. That is the case with this story, which originally appeared in Fan in 1998 (backstory here).
Many thanks to the folks at Bulb Culture Collective for selecting this for their Shine A Light series of writings.
Follow the journal on Twitter (I mean X) at @BulbCultCo.
Image via Bulb Culture Collective.
Why Steve Almond’s new book about the craft of writing is worth a read.
I’ve read my share of books about writing in my time, and most of them have given me at least a nugget or two of wisdom or inspiration. A new entry to the craft genre by Steve Almond, Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow: A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories, which came out in April, is one of the best I’ve read in a while.
If you’re a writer, you should read this book. Here are five reasons why:
Continue reading “Friday Five: Thoughts on Steve Almond’s ‘Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow’”Five great stories I’ve read recently.
As I continue to work on my writing — as I try to learn how to make my writing more compact and forcible — I’ve been paying greater attention to flash fiction lately.
I love how flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean describes the genre in a recent Friday Five Q&A on this site. Flash, he says, is “the flash bulb and the reaction in the dark, the scene coming in and out of focus, before being lost.”
I think these five recent flash stories capture that sentiment well. Enjoy.
Have a good weekend.
AI-generated image.
‘Short stories and novels are the whole nine rounds of a boxing match, while flash is a duck of one punch.’
The genre of flash fiction has become more popular and visible in recent years, thanks to the work of people like today’s Friday Five writer, Tommy Dean. A writer of “mostly flash fiction,” as he puts it on his website, Dean also is an editor of the flash fiction literary magazine Fractured Lit and a writing coach who offers editing services and writing workshops. He is the author of Hollows (Alternating Current Press, 2022), a collection of flash stories, and two flash fiction chapbooks, Special Like the People on TV (Redbird Chapbooks, 2014) and Covenants (ELJ Editions, 2021). He has been previously published in The Lascaux Review, New World Writing, and Pithead Chapel. His stories have been included in Best Microfiction 2019 and 2020. He lives in Indiana with his wife and two children, and he and I share the common experience of having detasseled corn in our youth.
Continue reading “Friday Five: Q&A with flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean”
