When I can I like to take part in some of the weekly flash fiction (micro fiction in some cases really) competitions and challenges that are out on ye olde ‘net. Like most of my writing though my participation has been very limited over the last 5 weeks or so. Happily I managed to write something for two of the challenges this week.
Category Archives: Fiction
A Little Micro Fiction
This is an entry for a flash fiction challenge put on at The Latinum Vault called Monday Mixer. There are quite a few rules but the important ones for you to know are I had to use exactly 150 words and had to choose a setting, object and adjective to use in the story. So, here it is:
Flash Fiction Challenge: Game of Aspects, Halloween Edition
I finally had some time to write and wasn’t feeling exhausted so I decided to get back on track by getting back to basics with a flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds.com. This week the challenge was another collection of random aspects with a horror theme in honor of Halloween. As usual the story follows (currently unnamed) and I’ll tell you what the aspects were afterward.
Story:
It had been at least two minutes since Raul Soto had first seen and reported the impossible woman and he had yet to respond to any of the disembodied voices entering his cabin. Each new voice grew more insistent and concerned than the last, but none could take his attention from the beauty that floated on the other side of the Dagon’s main window. Finally, the voice of the one person with more authority than him over this mission cut into the chatter.
Flash Fiction Challenge: More Random Goodness
Ok, this is another terribleminds flash piece. I’ve got some stuff to say about it but for now I’m making a quickie post here to make sure I get it in before the deadline. Not that it really matters, but I like to hit deadlines, even unimportant ones. I think it’s a good habit to develop.
The House on Cedar Avenue
Trent shuffled along Cedar Avenue on his way to the house. The first time he’d gone there he’d swaggered. He’d also nervously looked over his shoulder before crossing the threshold, paranoid, as any right thinking man would be, about who might be watching him go in. Tonight he glanced neither left nor right as he mounted the stairs. Experience had taught him that whatever arrangements for privacy needed to be made must have been made by Madame Zuul, because no one who should have cared about the goings on in the house on Cedar Avenue did.
Flash Fiction: Genre Aspects Mishmash
So at terribleminds last week Chuck Wendig put forth a challenge linked a discussion of “killing genre”. We had three lists to pick something from. A subgenre, am element to include and a theme, motif or conflict. For added fun some folks, like myself, used a random number generator to pick each of our choices from each list. Funny thing is I was the first to post my random results but I’ll probably be one of the last to put in an entry. I’ve written this story in a true flash style over the last hour and don’t have much time for editing, hopefully it hasn’t come out too much of a mess. I’ll tell you what three things I got at the end of this post. For now, here’s the story:
The Scoundrel and The Soldier
The Faraday crashed into The Bell’s Revenge and the sound of wood rubbing on wood became an ever-present noise that ran like a current beneath the surface sounds of men shouting and discharging their Webleys and Lee-Enfields. With the crash the ships swayed and those close to the sides grabbed hold of any part of the ship they could. Captain Daniel Jones found himself momentarily dangling half over the starboard side gunwale of The Bell’s Revenge, and only his quick reaction to steady himself kept him for going over the side. Looking down upon the toy-like trees and ant-like people below he was thankful that was not the case.
Flash Fiction: The Last Superhero
Ok, here’s another piece of flash fiction in response to a Chuck Wendig challenge at terribleminds.com. We had a list of 8 words and 4 of them had to appear in the story. This one came to me almost as soon as I read the list, thanks to some other ideas that had been floating around my brain recently thanks to a recent interview The Roundtable Podcast did with Matthew Wayne Selznick (website / twitter). You can find that interview here.
The Last Superhero
For a moment the whole country was silent. Every mourner, whether present in person or following along on TV, watched as the casket, covered in an iconic cape, made its way to the place of honour. Their greatest hero had fallen and everyone gathered with who they could to share their grief, and their fear.