Madeline Byrne June 2022 Second Prize

Between

by Madeline Byrne

Juliet cleans houses. The wealthy, high-ceilinged kind. She navigates hallways whose walls have absorbed the smell of absinthe, the spritz of champagne, the spell of lovemaking. She changes bedsheets and breathes in clouds of perfume, so potent, they pass through walls like full-bodied ghosts. There’s music, too. The walls take it in, every spin of the vinyl, every child’s violin lesson. Every woman who stumbles home after the opera, drunk and singing and making her lover laugh, cringe.

When Juliet cleans, she leaves a little part of herself behind. She is nowhere and everywhere at once; a payslip in the housekeeper’s tray, a strand of hair in the coat closet that causes her employer’s mistress to worry. Invisible cells of skin in the dustpan. When she walks the city at night, she becomes no one. A traceless blue shadow, an outline.

There was a time when she would walk halfway home before waving for the bus. Listen to the ebbs and exchanges that leaked over café terraces, the notes of heightened, private conversations drifting out of upper windows like the hems of curtains. It had been a time before Michel, before the subdued city. Now, it was a place where one fell into two of four sorts. The visible and the invisible, the dancers and the ones who turned their ear away from the music, toward the wireless with its shifting dials and talk of war.

When Juliet gets home, she watches her son sleeping. She lights a cigarette. Outside, a lone, late-night musician attempts to penetrate the night with the keys of a piano. Inside, the radio murmurs ceaselessly, filling the walls with voices.

About the Author

Madeline Byrne is an emerging writer based in Brisbane, Australia. A former bookseller, she now works as marketing assistant for the little-but-fierce university press, UQP. Madeline lives on the river with her husband and their British Shorthair, Obi. .

share by email

Abigail Williams June 2022 Third Prize

Don’t mistake me for your crabapple

by Abigail Williams

You are in the garden, kneeling among scarlet lupin spears. Savage, you stab the soil with your fork, weed out green tips with dark delight. I find myself lacing the edges of the lawn, shifting from one damp paver to the next. I am ornamental. Like your crabapple which refuses to blossom, I am in the wrong place.

‘Sam’s doing well at school,’ I offer. I hand these pearls, these claims to you, and I feel like my daughter presenting pieces of gravel in the pink crook of her palm, watching me intensely to check I understand their value. You hold the words for long enough to please me, before tipping them out of your ears. It is dangerous to show interest in the grandchildren. I might ask you for something. You fend me off with a long pole.

‘Carol and Jon had theirs again. A whole week.’ You look at me as if I sent them. ‘Carol was exhausted.’

I remember when you planted the lupins. And the hellebores on the shady side. The dahlias and the bee balm. You carved a new shape for the lawn, and you make dad crop it to lush stubs: US marine-green. Your garden is curated. You weigh it daily, your roving eye bleak and calculating. Do the plants feel themselves suspended in your balance, I wonder? Do they sense the threat of the fork, the severing of their clinging arms?

When they are tiny, you are tender. You patrol the borders with your slug scissors. You blanket buds when frost threatens like a mother wrapping winter’s child in a warm towel. But they are like me. Their petals will brown. Their bloom will fade. They will need you too much.

Always the shadow of your fork stripes our shoulders.

About the Author

Abigail Williams (@scribblingabby) lives and writes in Devon. She spent twenty years as a Marketing Director in Leeds, and is now wrestling with her Creative Writing MA dissertation at the University of Exeter. She won the Cranked Anvil Short Story Competition in February 2022, and the Evesham Festival of Words Short Story Competition in March. She was longlisted in the Oxford Flash Fiction Prize in spring 2022. Abby has been published in the journal Riptide and the anthology, More Gallimaufry.

share by email

Sudha Balagopal June 2022 Highly Commended

On Our Daughter’s Wedding Day

by Sudha Balagopal

I don’t miss wearing bright colors―red, orange, purple―or jasmine in my hair. I don’t miss the elaborate maroon bindis on my forehead. I don’t even miss the taali you knotted around my neck at our marriage ceremony―the one the priest commanded me to remove after death claimed you.

I do miss being a part of the religious pujas from which I must keep my distance as if I’m tainted, as if I’m contagious, as if my cursed ill-fortune can spread.

And, I miss you.

I miss you with an ache in my body’s cradle, where our daughter grew for nine months. I miss you because I cannot shower our child with love on this, her special day. I miss you because I’m told I shouldn’t stand on the mandapam where she’ll place her hand in her groom’s, where she’ll take the saptapadi―the seven steps of marriage―where her groom will tie her taali.

I miss you because if you were here, I wouldn’t be expected to watch our daughter’s nuptials from afar, shredding a moist, muslin handkerchief. I miss you because I’m instructed to stay tucked away, like a pariah, while your brother will take your place at the ceremony and his wife mine―as proxies for you and me.

I miss you, so I heave uneven breaths, then toss the handkerchief in the bin. I miss you, so I adjust the pleats of my sari. I miss you, so I straighten my spine, walk up to the mandapam. I miss you so I stand next to our daughter and her groom, offer them our blessings, yours and mine.

About the Author

Sudha Balagopal is honored to have her fiction in many fine literary journals including Smokelong Quarterly, Split Lip and CRAFT. Her highly commended novella in flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc Fiction in 2021. Her work is forthcoming in both Best Microfiction and Best Small Fictions, 2022.

share by email

Olwen Wilson June 2022 Highly Commended

The Shape of the Situation in Apartment 23C on a Sunday in September

by Olwen Wilson

Sick of soup-stained shirts, unending heartburn, and his wife’s attentive new friend from down the hall, the Horizontal Man decides to attempt standing up. He declares this to the Parallel Woman while reclining on their contorted couch, and out of earshot of their Upside-Down Child. She doesn’t ask why. She hasn’t asked him anything at all since that tall, hot-liquid-loving neighbour moved in.

“I’ll get the Vertical Vixen to help!” the Parallel Woman says through her gummy-grin.

“No! Not her! Ask the Spiralling Boy in 17D,” the Horizontal Man shouts.

His wife’s cheeks blush pink as she flees from his side. Then red when she knocks their Allen-key-assembled coffee table with her knee.

He hears her send the Upside-Down Child to fetch his foe from the Perpendicular Widow’s old apartment. She adds a lunch invitation as thanks before pushing their child toward 23E.

The click of the stove coming to life tells him his wife’s serving soup for their midday meal. He notices his antacids toppled on the table in front of him, beyond his reach.

When the Vertical Vixen arrives, the Horizontal Man can’t get up from the couch to greet her, nor does he want to. The Parallel Woman’s fawning over the Vertical Vixen’s towering frame reminds him of why he does.

Neither of them offers him any help in getting to his feet. Not even when he won’t contain his grunts and groans while scooching himself higher on the cushions.

They’re too busy swapping stew recipes.

Too busy complimenting the other’s smile.

Too busy declaring their undying love for the world above his view.

All he can do is stare at them sideways as his Upside-Down Child joins them to form a new trio.

About the Author

Olwen Wilson is a writer from Canada whose enthusiasm for finding joy in ordinary moments is contagious. She loves to be surrounded by loud laughter, unread books, paint and pens, cuddly cats, warm blankets, and birds singing outside her window. Her first published story, More Sludge Than Pink Popsicle Sticks, is in the Flash Fiction Festival Four anthology. Find Olwen online at olwenwilson.com and only occasionally on Twitter @Olwen_Allwen

share by email

London Launch of ‘Now You See Him’, new flash fiction collection by Tim Craig

Tim Craig’s brilliant debut flash fiction is released for publication, this Friday, 1st July by Ad Hoc Fiction, and it will then also be available on Amazon in paperback worldwide. You can still buy it before July 1st on preorder at a 25% discount from Ad Hoc Fiction. There’s a mini launch of the collection at the Flash Fiction Festival 8th -10th July in Bristol, where Tim will read a couple of his micros and another book launch on Wednesday 20th July at Ink@84 Independent Bookshop in London. Jude’s going to be there representing Ad Hoc Fiction, and it will be great to see lots of other flash fiction enthusiasts at the launch to hear Tim read, drink some wine and buy the book. It’s the first in-a-bookshop-launch coming up for an Ad Hoc Fiction published book in ages! Read the Q & A to find out more about the book and how Tim put it together.

    Q & A

  • Congratulations on the publication of your debut flash fiction collection Now You See Him with Ad Hoc Fiction. We know building a collection involves sifting, resifting, ordering and reordering. Can you tell us about your compiling process? And how you arrived at the title?
    I’m so pleased that Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing Now You See Him. Thank you, and for your patience as I prevaricated, messed around, changed the title, the cover, and the stories, a million times.

    Deciding which stories to include – and the order – was a process not unlike that of writing a story. A combination of logic (eg it seemed to make sense to finish with the story ‘That’s All There Is, There Ain’t No More’) gut feel, and trial and error. But, as with writing a story, I think you can overthink it. I wonder how many people sit down and read a collection of flash from beginning to end. Oh dear, have I just given myself away?

  • Do you think the collection has an overall theme?
    I’m not sure it has one clear overall theme, but there are definitely some subplots! I think loss / death is a significant subject in the collection – as it has been in my life. My relationship with my parents – and theirs with each other – also features in several stories. Sadly, they’re both gone now, but I guess I’m still turning the Rubik’s cube, trying to work it out.
  • Your writing style is very distilled and one of the compelling things about your fictions, is how more is revealed on each re-read. You are on a panel at the forthcoming Flash Fiction Festival where you, Sharon Telfer and Hannah Storm, talk about how your day jobs influence your writing of short-short fiction. You have worked for many years in radio. Do you think this work has influenced your facility in creating layers of meaning in your stories?

    I think the distilled style is certainly informed by writing for radio, where, because you have a lot to say in a very limited time —and because on radio you don’t generally have the opportunity to flit back and forth as you do on the page — the language needs to be extremely succinct and clear. I think any story worth the effort of reading will always have different layers of meaning, not all of which I think the author necessarily intends!

    • You are (or have been) a reader for Smokelong Quarterly and other magazines. Do you think this has influenced your writing of flash fiction too?
    • I was so honoured to be asked to read for Smokelong Quarterly. It is widely – and rightly – thought of as the best journal of short-short fiction. I was also very pleased to be asked to read for the wonderful Janus Literary which, in a very short space of time, has managed to elbow itself onto the top table of online literary magazines. I would encourage anyone who is offered the opportunity to read for a journal to snap it up. It’s a lot of work, and usually unpaid, but it gives you such a great overview of the work that’s out there, and forces you to confront why you believe a story works or doesn’t; generally, you learn to spot stories which are ‘dishonest’ with the reader, and thereby, hopefully, learn how not to be dishonest in your own writing. I’ve certainly been guilty of it in the past.
    • You are also known for your wit, which infilitrates much of your writing. Were you a stand up comedian in a previous life?
      I’m reminded of the old Bob Monkhouse line: ‘People used to laugh at me when I said I wanted to be a comedian. Well, they’re not laughing now.
      I’m far too much of a coward for stand-up. (though I have written comedy for BBC and independent radio, and elsewhere) Humour is very important to me in my writing. Someone once said ‘all fiction is irony’ and humour is a great tool. It’s an age-old gripe amongst writers that ‘funny’ stories rarely win the big prizes. But that’s as true for the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes as it is for most Flash Fiction awards. Having said that, ‘funny-for-funny’s sake’ has never really appealed to me. It needs to be working harder than that.
    • Now You See Him is being launched at The Flash Fiction Festival and you also have a bookshop launch planned in London on Wednesday 20th July.  Details please for people who might like to attend, have a glass of wine, hear you read from your book and hopefully buy a copy.

    It’s being held at the brilliant Ink@84 Bookshop, 84 Blackstock Road, Highbury Park, London, N5 2XE, from 6.30 pm -8.00 pm. Do come along and say hi!

    • You have been very successful in writing competitions in the last few years and have been placed three times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award, as well as being commended there and winning The Bridport Flash Fiction Prize. Now you have completed this publication, are you taking a break or working on anything else at the moment?
      After I finished writing for the collection, I found it difficult to write anything else for quite a while. Then the deadline for the latest round of the Bath Flash Fiction Award began to emerge from the mist, and my typing fingers started to get itchy. (‘I don’t need time, I need a deadline’ – Duke Ellington)
      It’s funny, though. People do ask if I might try writing a novel now. In the same way that, through all my years in radio, people have always asked me if I’ll ‘move up’ to TV. With radio, I felt at home straight away, and never felt any need or desire to go anywhere else. I feel the same way about flash / micro fiction. It’s not a staging post – it’s endlessly satisfying and surprising, both to read and to write. Why would I go anywhere else?
      (This almost certainly means the next thing I write will be a novel:)
    share by email

    Interview with John Brantingham, Judge for the 2023 & 2024 Novella-in-Flash Award

    John Brantingham was Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks’ first poet laureate. His work has been featured in hundreds of magazines, Writers Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016 and 2022. He has nineteen books of poetry and fiction including Life: Orange to Pear (Bamboo Dart Press). He is the founder and editor of The Journal of Radical Wonder. He lives in Jamestown, New York.

      We’re delighted that prose and poetry writer, teacher and editor from the US, John Brantingham, is judging our 2024 Novella in Flash Award again He has so much of interest to say in this interview, to inspire you to write a novella-in-flash. We hope you will give it a go and if you want to read a survey of the form and exercises to help you structure, and finish your novella as well as get ideas, the new craft guide book Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash, from blank page to finished manuscript by Michael Loveday,recently published by our small press, Ad Hoc Fction will help you with the writing process.

      Interview
    • Thank you for judging our 2024 Novella in Flash Award!
      As well as many poetry books, you have written three Novellas-in-Flash yourself. Inland Empire Afternoon, which was a runner up in the 2019 Bath Flash Fiction Award and published by Ad Hoc Fiction the same year, Finding Mr Pembroke, The Wapshot Press and Life: Orange to Pear, published by Bamboo Dart Press. Can you give us a few sentences about each of them and their themes?
        Inland Empire Afternoon follows a new character in about forty flashes, all linking to the others to tell the story of a region of the Los Angeles area. The Inland Empire is a much-maligned section of California. It is stereotyped and insulted because it is not nearly as wealthy as Los Angeles, and I don’t like that human tendency toward provincialism and hatred. I wanted to capture the humanity, grace, and craziness of the area, which might be anywhere.

        I wrote Finding Mr. Pembroke after a particularly difficult semester of teaching. It had been overwhelming physically and emotionally, and one day, I shut down. I just couldn’t move, so I wanted to capture that experience. Along with that, I’m well into middle age (as long as I live beyond 100), and it surprises me when I realize that I’m not in my twenties any longer. I wanted to deal with self-concept as well. It’s a book done in one long sentence, and I was hoping that it captured part of the reality of rumination, and the way I was feeling at the time. I couldn’t go to sleep, and I was never really awake.

      Life: Orange to Pear was written slowly, and I understood halfway through that I was asking and answering a question. It is about an alter ego of myself. I started out my adulthood on a journey to become an academic and dropped out of a Ph.D. program in favor of an MFA and the life of a writer. Sure I taught at a college, but the writing I was doing stopped being academic at that point. I was a dismal academic writer. My articles tended to explore the obvious. I also missed the experience of fatherhood, so this answers the question to me of how my life would have been different with those two changes. The answer I came to was that I would have been a boozy, erratically employed father of someone I loved deeply. I’ve written a shadow companion to it called Finnegans Awake to ask and answer other questions about myself. Actually, that entire collection was inspired by an exercise at the Bath Flash Fiction Festival last autumn.

    • What interests you in the novella in flash as a form?
      I like the way that it breaks away from previous modes of expression that were damaged by financial concerns. So much of writing before the new technologies of today was limited by the realities of print media. It was too expensive and too difficult to distribute forms like flash or the novella. A friend of mine wrote and published a flash novella in the 1970s, Gerald Locklin’s The Case of the Missing Blue Volkswagen. It is an absolutely brilliant book that changed the way I understood fiction, but it never got the kind of distribution it needed. It asks us to reconceptualize not only what fiction is but what life is because it can be a series of interlocking moments with or without narrative arc, as our lives often are.
      The problem with this is that when we limit forms of expression, we limit what we can say, and voices that should be heard are silenced. It is part of the process of gatekeeping, and I want to hear as many points-of-view as possible. It’s not just about the kinds of stories that we can tell, but the ways that we see. It’s not just story; it’s point-of-view. Not all concepts can be expressed in 100,000 words, and so these new forms, like the novella-in-flash, allow us to explore other selves and ideas (We need to be able to see from other people’s perspective. David Foster Wallace tells us why.).
    • For many years you were a professor of English at Mt. San Antonio College, California,where you coordinated the creative writing programme and ran the yearly creative writing conference. But you have recently left teaching there and moved to New York State.
      Have you plans to teach elsewhere?
      I might. Technically, I’m just on leave so I might return to Mt. SAC, but currently I’m feeling that I’d rather not. The work I did there was good and important, maybe the most important work I will ever do, but I’d like to focus more on creative writing than I did there. I had a kind of hybrid assignment where I taught creative writing and essay writing, and I worked with and evaluated part-time professors.
      What I’d like to do now is teach creative writing exclusively. I don’t know what the realities of the United Kingdom are, but in the United States there is too much gatekeeping, starting with professors who do not help their students find their own voice and platform. Many educators ask their students to mimic their voices. I want to help people create something that is true to them and their experiences. I love to help marginalized students find their audience for the same reason I love new forms of fiction. I want to hear new things. This might be at a formal college or university or in places like flash fiction festivals. It could be in the United States or outside of it. I don’t know. I’m so new to not being a tenured professor that I’m still spinning a little; after all, for twenty-five years my first name was Professor. Now, I’m back to being John.
    • Have you any new writing projects on the go?
      I always work on many projects at once. I just finished a collection of 100 ekphrastic sonnets about four artists who lived through times of war, Miro, Klee, Goya, and David. Some of their art gives a path forward through international trauma. David often celebrates tyranny, propping up dictators like Napoleon. Of course, this is the nationalistic quest, and I see many in my country acting in the same way. I’d like to understand those people, but I doubt I ever will.

        At the same time, I’m working on a flash novella or novel following the life cycle of one person born during WWII. We follow his life and the effect that war has on him. It resists the idea that there are individual wars rather than just one war that shifts all over the world. If we say, WWII ended, then there’s no way that it can. There’s more to it than that. There are other throughlines like how returning to nature heals, but that was the impetus for the work.
        My third collection in progress is a series of free verse poems looking at empty spaces and why they have been abandoned, and how that abandonment feels in a world that is often hostile and feels meaningless to people who live in it. I live in a rural part of New York State and people are leaving for places like the Inland Empire, California. There are abandoned factories and houses everywhere.
      The fourth project, which I’m more or less done with, is about the Santa Ana River Watershed. It’s an 80 page haibun about what makes a watershed. In the Los Angeles area, where the Santa Ana River is, water is so scarce that it must be used and reused. If a drop of water lands on a mountain, it’s likely to pass through 3 or 4 people before it reaches the ocean. That means the human population is part of the calculation that the water resources people make when they try to understand how much water there is. This fact makes it clear that we are a part of nature, not disconnected. We are in fact a part of the watershed; we are a mobile reservoir. I try to explore those connections to nature. “Connection” is even the wrong word because it implies disconnection is possible. It is not. We are of the rivers that run past and through us.
    • You have also recently started The Journal of Radical Wonder on Medium. Can you tell us more about it and how people can submit and what you are looking for?
      It’s a journal that came out of years of conversations with my writing partners. I agree very much with Hannah Arendt about the dangerous nature of the banality of evil, and we’re trying to extend that idea a bit. Being able to see this world, any part of it, as banal is where evil begins. The lens of banality is a way of seeing beauty, oneness, and connection as being disposable (Have you heard Cosmo Sheldrake’s song against boredom? Here it is.). Not everything needs to be positive, but it’s trying to understand how everyday moments are not simple or humdrum. It fights cynicism, which is a sophomoric approach to life meant to make someone seem smart without taking the time to understand.
      What I’d like people to submit is anything that lays bare what is true in this world. I don’t want to read anything merely clever. I hate smugness and punching down. I assume that I’m wrong about a lot in this world. I want to be shown the truth.
      Okay, so on a practical level, what would l like to see? Flash of all sorts. Poetry, although formatting on medium is very limited, so I think it’s best to send poems that rely on shape to other publications. Essays. Book reviews. We’d love more book reviews. Interviews. Art and images, these don’t go to me but to Jane Edberg, the visual arts editor.
      Here’s the link to our submissions page. Please send me work. At heart, I am more of a teacher than an editor. I’d love to have a conversation about your work: Link to our submission guidelines.
    • If you are able to answer this, it would be very interesting to know what kind of novella would particularly grab your attention?

      I want to understand other people in a profound and meaningful way. I want to have a moment of humanity. I’m driven by character and setting. Kathy Fish, Kendall Johnson, Romaine Washington, Aimee Bender, Grant Hier, Tony Barnstone, Pamela Painter, Karen Jones, Lynne Thompson, Michael Loveday, and Stuart Dybek move me. Kareem Tayyar always floors me. I think he’s one of the best living writers. All of these writers and poets show us what it means to be human. Of course, I love others too, but this kind of writing tends to reach me.

    • A tip for the difficult moments in writing a longer narrative in flash fictions?
      When I am having trouble moving through writing, it usually has to do with me running from trauma. When that happens, I try to understand what it means, and what pain I’m afraid to work through.
      A psychologist friend of mine once said that nightmares are not the problem, they are the solution your body is giving you, and you need to listen to them. When we’re entering fiction, we’re entering dreamtime. If you’re struggling, it could very well be this. It also might be that it’s dangerous in these moments to proceed alone. Support systems matter. The image of the alienated writer is a warning, not an aspiration.
      On top of that, if you’ve had the kind of shame-based vaguely religious childhood training grounded on groupthink and cognitive dissonance that I had, everything in your stupid brain will tell you that if you enjoy an experience then it must be without value, that if you create something, it has no meaning, and that everyone around you always has greater insights than you do.
      Let me tell you this:

    Your work is important.

    Your voice matters.

    The world needs to hear what you have to say.

    Also, if you are a beginning writer, please watch this: Ira Glass’s flash essay.

    share by email

    Q and A with Caroline Greene, Winner, 2022 Bath Novella-in-Flash Award.

    Caroline Greene won our 2022 Novella-in-Flash Award in April this year with her wonderful Novella in Flash, Lessons at the Water’s Edge and the novella is now available on preorder from Ad Hoc Fiction at a 25% discount until publication on July 1st. We’re delighted Caroline’s novella will be launched at the Flash Fiction Festival 8th-10th July. The 2023 Novella-in-Flash Award will be open soon and Caroline has some great advice here for writing one. Scroll down the post of our judge Michelle Elvy’s report to find her interesting comments on this novella. It is a marvellous, absorbing read with many layers and we thoroughly recommend it. You can also hear Caroline talking about it next week on a panel about novellas-in-flash for National Flash Fiction Day New Zealand, 19th June.

        Q & A with Caroline Greene
      • Can you give us a brief synopsis of Lessons At the Water’s Edge?
        It’s the story of a young woman leaving difficulties at home and going to live in a different country. But it’s also the story of the family she goes to live with, and the changes she brings, from their point of view. There are new discoveries about identity, but there are also love stories that intertwine – the love for a place, for family, and an unrequited love too. And it’s about how language connects and moulds us, with ‘language lessons’ that thread through the whole.
      • What inspired you to write it? 
        This has been a very long time in gestation! Many, many years ago I wrote a short story called ‘The Father’, about a dedicated single father, bringing up two girls. It was inspired by a story by Natalia Ginzburg called ‘The Mother’, about an erratic single mother bringing up two boys. But I never really did anything with it. Then, a few years ago, when I discovered flash fiction, I wrote a couple of scenes based on my experience of living in Italy. I had an idea of combining elements of the short story with the flashes, but was very dithery and unconfident about it. Then when lockdown began and I started to get messages from Italian friends I just thought, now is the time to celebrate the experiences I had there and the people I met.
      • In her comments Michelle Elvy points out how the novella, which is set in a watery city (unnamed) flows like water and, she remarks that ‘the story lines glide, skim, sometimes sink below the surface and then emerge again.’ Were you aware of the elemental component of your writing, when you were structuring it?
        I love that Michelle picked this out. In a way it was the most subconscious outcome. On a conscious level, I tried to weave the three strands together in a loose way to convey how the various experiences and the different points of view informed each other. But the water imagery was doing this too.
      • What is the most challenging aspect about writing a novella in flash, in your experience?
        I would definitely avoid trying to think of the thing as a ‘whole’ from the start. That’s too daunting. Although I had a story, I only had a rough idea of how it would be put together, so I just wrote scenes in a random order and gradually a patchwork pattern emerged. The beauty of writing a novella in flash is that you can construct scenes individually and follow thoughts where they want to go, without trying to follow any strict linear structure or plot line. But it’s sometimes hard to be ruthless when you have a suspicion that a certain flash doesn’t work within the whole and so it needs to go.
      • What did you most enjoy about the process? 
        Once I’d thought that I could create a novella out of the early pieces I had, I absolutely loved the impetus it gave me for writing more. I loved living with the characters and I had fun with the language lessons. While life was strange, difficult and uncertain during lockdown, I also had this other world of the novella going on inside my head.
      • Have you any other flash fiction projects on the go? 
        Once I’d submitted the novella, I felt as though I’d never write anything ever again! But gradually ideas have crept back and I trust myself more now to follow them through.
      • Top tip for someone thinking of writing one? 
        Trust the process. Follow inklings and instincts. Eventually, it feels as though the separate flashes almost tell you where they are all going, and how they fit together.
      share by email

    Tips from Tommy Dean on writing micros

    Our 21st £1460 prize fund Award closes this Sunday, 5th June, midnight GMT. And whether you are polishing an entry for the competition, about to write one last minute, or thinking about other submission opportunities, here are some excellent tips on writing micros from our judge Tommy Dean. Read our Judge’s Q and A with him here.

    Tommy gave us permission to publish the thread he wrote on Twitter today, which has a focus on 100 word stories. But the advice is equally important for anyone writing longer flashes. To remind you, you have 300 words maximum for our Award.

    We’re thrilled our small press, Ad Hoc Fiction, is publishing a guide book next year (2023) by Tommy on writing 100 word stories. So he will be adding examples and exercises to the sort of advice he has listed below. And if you want to read Tommy’s own brilliant work, his latest flash fiction collection, Hollows, is out with Alternating Current Press and also available on Amazon Read in Full

    share by email