Flash Fiction Friday : Their Song

The radio began to play True as she washed out her teacup. Their song. Dripping soapy water, she crossed the kitchen to change station.







Flash Fiction Friday is a weekly post of a work of fiction small enough to appear on Twitter etc.

Seven Reasons to Write Short Stories

I write quite a bit of short fiction : short stories, flash fiction, even Twitter fiction. Sometimes I wonder why, because no-one reads short fiction that much do they? Out there in the real world, people basically read novels. It always seems like the short form should be well-suited to our hectic lives, but somehow the book charts remain resolutely full of 300-pagers.

So why write shorts? After some thought, here are my reasons for doing so :

• Writing a novel takes a long time. It can be a commitment of years. But you can write and see a short story published in a fraction of that time. So you get invaluable encouragement - or, at least, feedback.
• Some stories just are short stories. That's the length they need to be. It's hard to imagine Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper or Asimov's Nightfall, say, being any longer than they are.
• Life is too short. They other day I skimmed through my story idea jottings. There are hundreds of them. I may not get round to writing 100 novels before time taps me on the shoulder. I could write 100 short stories.
• A portfolio of short story writing credits is a way to establish your name, build your platform, find a readership and also hone your own voice.
• Writing short stories is fun, a release, a distraction from your novel WIP and that tricky plot twist two-thirds of the way in. You can write novels and short stories.
• In some genres (oh, how I hate that disparaging word), the short-story is very well-established anyway and certainly an end in itself. SF and fantasy are the obvious ones.
• There are a lot more openings for short fiction : magazines and publishers who will take your work without requiring an agent to act as an intermediary. You only have to look at a site like Duotrope to see how many potential markets there are.

So, seven good reasons, but I'm sure there are others. Did I miss anything? Can you add any reasons to the list? Or do you stick to novels?

Flash Fiction : Light Years (46/100)

... year. ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Flash Fiction Friday : A Zombie Walked into a Bar

The zombie slouched into the Space Bar. ‘Yes?’ asked the bar-droid. The zombie looked round, confused. ‘Sorry,’ it said. ‘Wrong genre.’







Flash Fiction Friday is a weekly post of a work of fiction small enough to appear on Twitter etc.

The Twitter Fiction Storm Continues!

Another piece of my Twitter-sized microfiction is published over at Thaumatrope today. This one is called Giving Blood. This is my fifth sale to this particular market. Hope you enjoy it.

Who Do You Write Like?

Thanks to Anne R. Allen for pointing me at the I Write Like page, where you can discover which famous writer's prose your own (supposedly) resembles. You paste in some of your work and it performs a statistical analysis to find a match. You just can't avoid trying it can you?

Mind you, I'd take it with a pinch of salt. I tried various short stories and novel chapters of mine and found that :

I write like
Douglas Adams

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

and

I write like
H. G. Wells

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

and

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Which, OK, I'm happy with - three writers I love - but it seems a little unlikey I resemble all of them.

And, unable to resist the temptation, I then typed in a bad swear word a hundred times and was told :

I write like
William Gibson

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Which seems just a wee bit harsh on Gibson ...

Who did you get when you try?

Rockets (Flash Fiction) To Be Published by WeirdYear

 A flash fiction story of mine called Rockets has just been accepted by WeirdYear and will be appearing there in mid-August. This was one of the stories I wrote for Story A Day in May, so it's great to see it out there already.

The story is kind of speculative/SF, but also kind of magic realist. Depending on how you read it. Here's an excerpt :

He knew he wouldn’t have to go up very far. The edge of space was only fifty miles away. It was further than that to London and he went there often. All he needed was enough power. Enough thrust.

I'll let you know when it's out there ...

Flash Fiction : Light Years (45/100)

... every ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Flash Fiction Friday : Change

“Spare a pound, mate?”
The suit scowled back. “Get a fucking job.”
Max smiled. Truth was a year ago he’d have said just the same thing.







Flash Fiction Friday is a weekly post of a work of fiction small enough to appear on Twitter etc.

Update on my eStories

Is eStories even a word? Probably not.

The two SF short stories I've ePublished via Amazon and Smashwords continue to do pleasingly well. Had a nice five star review on Live from the Continuing Explosion on the Smashwords site today :

I found this a moving story and couldn't stop reading until I'd finished it.

I'm sure reviews like this make a big difference. So far this story has had around 15 downloads from Smashwords and a couple of sales over at Amazon. It's a good start. The Armageddon Machine, meanwhile, has had about 75 downloads at Smashwords and well over 100 purchases for the Kindle, which is pleasing. It's currently at #44 in the Kindle SF short stories chart.

Obviously these downloads/sales are good in and of themselves. I think I see them mostly as "platform building" though. I've been careful to include links to my web site and this blog at the end of each story in the hope that readers will come looking for more ...

Meanwhile I'm thinking about releasing one of my currently unavailable fantasy novelettes in a similar way too. I'll keep you posted on how that goes ...

New Nanofiction Work Published by PicFic

PicFic have chosen another of my nanofiction pieces as the winner of their weekly pictorial writing prompt competitions and it's online now. If you've not come across this magazine before, they accept unsolicited submissions of short (Twitter sized) stories in response to a weekly picture. It's a lot of fun. They post the pictures via @PicFicPrompt on Twitter, guidelines here.

This week's picture was this one :

You can read the flash story this inspired - Monsters in the Basement - here.

Flash Fiction : Light Years (44/100)

... consciousness ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

The New Blog Template Is Go!

If you're reading this directly on my blog rather than via the RSS feed, you'll have noticed that I've implemented the shiny new template I was playing around with the other day. It's much, much better I think. Thanks for all the suggestions and feedback everyone.

Still a few tweaks and enhancements to make but I think the main stuff is there. I'm going to try really hard to keep it simple and not clutter it up with new gadgets from now on ...

Flash Fiction Friday : Final Day

‘So we’re agreed. We attack Earth on July 11th.’ Zorn Prime grinned. ‘With this World Cup of theirs they won’t even notice for two hours.’




This story originally appeared on Thaumatrope on June 11th. I'm republishing it here just to provide a timely warning ...



Flash Fiction Friday is a weekly post of a work of fiction small enough to appear on Twitter etc.

New Nanofiction piece published by Thaumatrope

Another work of Twitter Fiction of mine has been published by Thaumatrope today. This one is called Scarecows. I've just re-read it and it's a bit spooky actually. Did I really write that?

New Blog Template?

I've been monkeying around with a new blog template, as this one is a bit dull. I've set up a shadow blog to test things out. What do you think? Too much colour/decoration? Not enough? Any opinions gratefully received because I've looked at about 500 different templates now and I can't think straight any more!

Book Review : The Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko

Urban fantasy set on the streets of Moscow : I'll give this 4 out of 5 stars. It's original and a lot of fun. The world is caught in a Manichean struggle between the Light Ones and the Dark Ones, who have agreed a sort of truce so that neither side can act without the other being able to counteract. It's chess on a global scale, but with Russian vampires and dark wizards. Like I say, a lot of fun.

On occasion it sags badly. The start of the third story, for example (the book consists of three related stories) seems to me tedious and self-indulgent. The translation clunked a bit at times too and Lukyanenko has the annoying habit of using short, punchy paragraphs to add excitement.

Like this!

Quite a lot!

A bit irritating isn't it?

Still, these are minor quibbles. I'm keen to start on the second volume (The Day Watch), so that must be a good sign. Recommended.

Oh, as an aside, the blurb on the cover of my edition is a quote from the UK newspaper The Daily Telegraph, that says "J. K. Rowling ... Russian style". This tells you nothing about the book and quite a lot about how useless the Telegraph is. It's lazy and silly. What, The Night Watch has magic in it so it must be like Harry Potter? Is that how that works? Idiots.

Night Watch

Flash Fiction : Light Years (43/100)

... week's ...








Light Years is a work of flash fiction. In fact it is the slowest piece of flash-fiction ever written. In real-time its one hundred words would take exactly 10,000 years to recount. Because of the limitations of a normal human life-span, it has been specially accelerated to the speed of one word per week. It will therefore take just under two years to tell from start to finish.

For a full history of the transmissions, click here.

Flash Fiction Friday : Massively Addicted

He'd eaten, yet was hungry. He'd rested, but was exhausted. How many lives was he now living? Time to create another, this time an elf!


This story is a guest post by Andy Yates. Andy is one half of the Bumpkin-Brothers game design team (http://www.bumpkinbrothers.com) who try to write as many games as they possibly can in what they laughingly call “Their Spare Time.” Their latest release is The Machine, which I've played quite a bit and can confirm is perfect for a few minutes respite from the writing!

Andy currently lives in the deepest darkest depths of Gloucestershire in the UK. He likes cake.



Flash Fiction Friday is a weekly post of a work of fiction small enough to appear on Twitter etc.

I'm a Writer Actually

So, the other day I did it. I called myself a writer. In public. Just dropped it into the conversation, all casual-like. I half-expected the room to go immediately very quiet and everyone to look round in shock. But no-one did.

Someone at my guitar lesson asked me what I did and I explained how my life works : In the mornings I design and write computer programs for a software house. In the afternoons, before the kids come home from school, I write fiction. The other person simply looked interested and then the usual questions ensued ("Ah, what have you written ...")

But it was easy. What was there to be afraid of? Yeah, I'm a writer actually. Me? Oh, I'm a writer ...