I thought I’d kick this year’s posting season off (after the summer lull) with a change to my weekly schedule. I’m going to try posting “#FridayFlash Favorites” on Friday, one week after the stories themselves were originally posted. I’m hoping that will give these stories more exposure, especially with the #FridayFlash crowd.

Each Friday, writers post on Twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash.

I myself have been absent through the summer (and into the fall). But I did manage to post one story a couple weeks ago, about a young woman with a painful secret, and about the way our society treats people who have painful secrets, and how we maybe ought to treat them.

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

#FridayFlash Favorites (for November 5)

Slim pickin’s this week, so I included a few stories from a few weeks ago, too. In no particular order…

• “Edna Saves The World From An Alien Takeover” by John McDonnell — Another amusing anecdote of Larry the Alien.

• “Charity Case” by Peggy McFarland — Conditional generosity: a truth or an oxymoron?

• “Twitching” by Rol Hirst — Two incompatible perceptions of the world meet each other. Which of the two characters are you?

• “The Art of Blowing Bubbles” by Adam Byatt — You can never blow bubbles when you are angry.

• “Hysterica” by Jason Sullivan — A fantasy about the value of stuff. Stuff will never let you down!

• “Shedding” by Emma Newman — Maybe you don’t actually want to know what your husband is tinkering away with out in the shed.

• “Graveyard Dance” by Gracie Motley — Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some have unwittingly entertained angels… or witches.

Note: 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 preferred flash fiction qualities; your mileage may vary. 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 to avoid figuring 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 I usually dislike in flash.)

Till next week, and…

Keep writing!
-TimK