Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. This week, I reran a story I had written over a year ago, about a man who learns to find romance. This story breaks 5 of the 10 Flash-fiction rules that I usually follow, but it still works. (Just another demonstration that most rules are best used as tips to serve you, not strictures to bind you.)

Of the rest of the stories that were posted last Friday, here are my…

#FridayFlash Favorites for June 25

Of 109 stories posted Friday (including the 86 that made it onto the official #FridayFlash Report for June 25), here are my 9 favorites, listed in no particular order.

• “The Shades of Chawton” by Jane Travers — An otherworldly empath touches an unusual visitor to her lair. Wonderful imagery, and inventive use of the paranormal.

• “Rescue Missions” by A.M. Harte — Well, this bumbling version of Prince Charming probably got what he deserved. Ha!

• “May I Come In?” by Melissa L. Webb — No, I don’t believe in the Bogeyman, either… I think.

• “I’ll Eat My Gun” by John Wiswell — In the old west, Bad James finds a creative way to perform his end of an extreme bet.

• “Breaking The Girl” by Al Bruno III — Lorelei the sorceress may be beaten and bruised, but she knows something her tormenter doesn’t. He’s such an amateur!

• “Of Nights Then and Now” by Leah Petersen — This week, Leah reruns a piece from a few months ago: When a mother’s little girl grows too big to fit between Mommy and Daddy, what’s a mother to do?

• “Once Upon a Time Everyone Had Bodies” by Lydia Ondrusek — Lydia does it again, this time with a little SF flavor.

• “A Missed Flight” by Leila Vandiver — Not really a character story, but the epilogue (the very last paragraph) makes this story worth reading.

• “Bumwattle’s Bird” by Chris Chartrand — And now for something completely different: an alternative, humorous story, about a mind-bending parrot. Could almost be a Monty Python sketch.

Note: To be selected as one of my #FridayFlash Favorites, the post must be a genuine flash story, not a chapter in a longer piece, a series of one-paragraph vignettes, or anything else. It should have a beginning (conflict), a middle (thickening), and an end (resolution). Not necessarily a happy ending (though I do enjoy happy endings), but whatever conflict the story introduces at the beginning, it must resolve at the end. No fair building up suspense and then stopping in the middle of the story, just so you don’t have to figure out how to save the hero in 1,000 words or less; that’s cheating. The story should also be a single scene, because multi-scene flash usually does too much “telling” and doesn’t “show” enough to engage me in the story. (And scene divisions stop the flow, which is usually a bad idea in flash.) While I do browse Twitter for #FridayFlash posts, the best way to get me to read yours is to put it on the #FridayFlash Collector. I judge posted stories according to my own preferences; your mileage may vary.

Till next week, and…

Keep writing!
-TimK