micro fiction – Page 2 – Andrew Careaga

Published in Painted Pebble Lit Mag

My micro fiction story “Spindled” is in the latest issue of Painted Pebble Lit Mag, a publication devoted to short-form writing. I would be honored if you took a few minutes of your day to read it. (You can also listen to me reading it if you prefer.)

Dad was a computer programmer. While other kids’ dads brought home stacks of clean white office paper for them to draw on, ours came home with stacks of manila-colored, rectangular cards with tiny rectangular holes punched through them. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate, warned the fine print of the cards.

From “Spindled,” by Andrew Careaga

Friday Five: selections from ‘Best Small Fictions 2025’

A sampling from this year’s recently selected stories and prose poems

Alternating Current Press recently announced the selections for the 2025 edition of The Best Small Fictions anthology, and there are some great ones you can read online, right now. Here are five I enjoyed that were published in some literary magazines I try to read regularly.

“At Once,” by Sarah Freligh, published in Ghost Parachute.
“Based on a True Story,” by Epiphany Ferrell, published in the (unfortunately now closed) Witcraft.
“They fired up the laser,” by Timothy C. Goodwin, published in Dishsoap Quarterly.
“Finding the Water to Cry,” by Jacqueline Goyette, published in Stanchion.
“Splinter,” by Didi Wood, published in Fractured Lit.

Have a good weekend.

Friday Five: Q&A with ‘Short Story, Long’ founder Aaron Burch

‘ I often feel happiest and most fulfilled when I read a submission and fall in love with it …’

You might call Aaron Burch a serial literary magazine founder.

His journey into the litmag world began in 2001, when he founded Hobart. He spent over two decades editing that journal, and toward the end of his tenure there he co-founded HAD, an online journal focused on publishing microfiction. Soon after that, he founded Words & Sports Quarterly, a sports-oriented literary magazine that is currently on hiatus.

Two years ago this spring, he launched his latest literary project, Short Story, Long, as a place for longer fiction — stories in the 2,000- to 8,000-word range, although stories of 3,000 to 5,000 words hit the publication’s “sweet spot.” (Read more about the publication and submission guidelines.)

Friday Five: Q&A with flash fiction writer and editor Tommy Dean

‘Short stories and novels are the whole nine rounds of a boxing match, while flash is a duck of one punch.’

Tommy Dean

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.

Published!

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing around with flash fiction and its subgenre micro fiction as a way of trying to crystallize my writing. One tangible result is this story, “Lunch break.”

Wouldn’t you know it: two days after telling you that I seldom use the exclamation point, it makes an appearance in the title of a post for the second time in a row.

Its presence is deserved, I think, to help convey the joy of getting published less than a month into this new leg of my writing journey.

“Lunch Break,” a bit of micro fiction I submitted to the website Paragraph Planet, is today’s featured story on the site. Huzzah!