Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. On July 23, I didn’t post anything for #FridayFlash, because I was still recovering from my life blowing apart. (I also didn’t post anything today, although I did start on a story.) Most of my time and mental energy has been taken up with a new software contract I’m on. But now that I’m on the ground running on the project, I should have some brain cells free to do some serious writing over the next month.

More immediately, today I sent in my first invoice, and I gotta tell ya, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen that many digits after the dollar sign (except on my credit-card bill). As a thank-you to God and the universe, I’m planning an Internet-wide Monster Book Give-away next month, hundreds of copies of my short memoir Love through the Eyes of an Idiot and From the Ashes of Courage, the first Ardor Point novel. The give-away is still in the initial planning stages, but if you have a blog and you’d like to give away a copy of one of these books, please contact me and let me know, and I’ll add you to the list.

With no further ado: of the #FridayFlash stories that were posted, here are my…

#FridayFlash Favorites for July 23

There were 103 stories (including the 82 that made it onto the official #FridayFlash Report for July 23). Of all those, here are my 8 favorites, listed in no particular order.

• “The Rattle” by Eric J. Krause — How many of our problems are caused by the forces we ourselves let loose?

• “The Problem With Gavin” by Isabel Joely Black — The big bang reloaded.

• “How They Met” by Icy Sedgwick — An exciting story of heroism and salvation.

• “Leap” by Neil Shurley — While I also enjoyed his other story, “Hunger,” “Leap” really got to me. How often does your mind shut down in order to avoid thinking about a subject you find painful? Too often, if you’re anything like me.

• “Transition Village Columbia” by Mike Robertson — Another story about the power of and human need for community.

• “Thanks, You Too” by Orjan Westin — Alternative fiction about the mechanization of society. (Laughs maniacally.)

• “Broken” by Lauren Cude — Lauren is back in this list for the third time. I’ll have to remember this charming and inspiring story, the next time my magic wand breaks.

• “A Lost Weekend (or Something Like)” by Dave Bartlett — Lastly, a humorous lesson in drinking responsibly. (Maybe it’s a good thing that I’m not nor have any desire to be the so-called life of the party.)

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