Each Friday, writers post on twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. On August 6, I posted a story about a date gone bad.

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

#FridayFlash Favorites for August 6

I found an even 100 stories (including the 80 that made it onto the official #FridayFlash Report for August 6). Of those, here are my 8 favorites, listed with my 3 favorite authors first. (That is, the #FridayFlash authors who have most often appeared in these favorites lists.)

• “Noodle” by Neil Shurley — You can’t escape who you are, and you probably don’t really want to.

• “His Shirt is Orange” by Leah Petersen — I can sympathize. My Little One doesn’t even want to grow up. But no force in the universe can stop her.

• “Quick Draw” by T.S. Bazelli — “The dead ain’t never in a rush.” A story about a life-grizzled woman with a future.

• “Common Ground” by Rachel Carter — Can any two birds as different as a parrot and a swan make a life together?

• “Blood Bound” by G.L. Drummond — Time to take the big risk; you can always choose to regret it later, if you survive.

• “I Baptize Thee” by Dan Haring — (Actually, untitled; but I’m listing it under the title of the painting that inspired it.) A story about anger and remembrance.

• “Road Test” by J.M. Strother — Yeah, I probably wouldn’t have taken it, either.

• “Strippers, Planets, Months and Days” by Susan Cross — Hmm… Maybe “da rulez” are more superstition that we think, eh? Words are cheap, but if you really want to know what someone believes, look at what she does, not at what she says.

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