Fun news! A story I submitted to Podcastle’s flash
fiction contest (500 words or less) is now a semifinalist! The competition has
gone from about 215 stories down to 51.
I finished a decent draft of this piece in March-ish at ~900
words, but it needed some tightening. So the challenge to drop down to 500 was the
perfect boost to get cutting. The competition is strictly anonymous, so I won’t
talk more about the piece itself, but I may post later, after names have been
revealed.
If you are a SFF reader who loves very short
fic, you’re welcome to read and participate in the voting. The forum where they
hold the contest is currently down, unfortunately. They had some tech bugs at a
very good-and-bad time. Good because they’d just finished up the first round of
voting. Bad because those of us in the semifinals are now holding our breath. All
my sympathies to their “tech barbarians” for having to get this sorted. When the
forum is up again, I’ll share a link to show you how you can get involved.
As I mentioned, the competition is very anonymous, so please, if you are among the few who
know which piece is mine, don’t vote in my semifinalist group! And obviously
don’t say, “Oh, hey! This is Jeanna’s story!” Or do anything else nefarious,
like creating multiple accounts at a single household, etc.—I really don’t want
to succeed by cheating. (And I am up against some really fantastic stories, as
well as a few I don’t particularly care for—but there are enough wonderful ones
that it’s going to be hard.)
In other news, I’ll be doing NYC Midnight’s flash
fiction contest again this year. It’s going to be weird doing it from an
Australia time zone rather than New York’s. I’ll write for half a day on
Saturday, take a break for Sunday, and finish my piece on Monday morning, so
that’s a bit different.
In honor of preparing for this contest, and to dust off
my rusty writing skills, I’m requesting some prompts! So if you’re still
reading this post, I’d love to have you comment with the following: a genre, a location,
and an object. Be as random as you want. Then I’ll pick a couple of these and
write some flash fiction! If I choose your prompts, I’ll also send you my story
to read (it may be great or it may be trash—it’s like a grab bag from the
dollar store, where you have no idea what you’re going to get!).
That’s it for now! Thanks for reading.
