Remember these?

Each Friday, writers post on Twitter a link to a short-short story they’ve written, marked with the tag #FridayFlash. And I (eventually) wrap up my favorites of these into a “FridayFlash Favorites” post.

I had begun and fully intended to continue these posts a few months ago, in November. Instead, my summer continued for a couple more months. And I’m just now getting back on track, though the continual, beating snow in these parts has made that process slow and difficult as well.

So now I have quite a backlog of stories to read through. And I am slowly reading through them, or rather drawing on them to fill out what my favorites from more recent stories. Over the past weeks, I’ve hit a dry spell when it comes to stories. I don’t know whether it’s just because I read Talyn and Hawkspar since last year, and maybe they’ve ruined all other stories for me. Or maybe a number of my favorite writers have been taking breaks until recently (which is also true).

In any case, here are 7 of my…

#FridayFlash Favorites (from January 28 and earlier)

• “A Viking In The Kitchen” by John McDonnell — Larry the Alien redecorates Dolores’s kitchen, and oh what posh!

• “Used Brooms” by Eric J. Krause — Wouldn’t life be so much easier if we could just learn to take “Yes” for an answer?

• “Nebi’s Secret” by Gracie Motley — Never assume.

• “Unexpected” by Neil Shurley — Why we befriend other people.

• “Better to Have Loved And Lost” by G.P. Ching — To eternity, and beyond.

• “Hairshirt In Reverse” by Rol Hirst — Sometimes, we hang on to whatever we can for security.

• “A Story worth Telling” by Mandy K James — Pursuing a legacy.

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