Nominations for online stories published in 2008 are now open for the storySouth Million Writers Award. This award is determined by the votes of readers rather than a small panel. The award is fashioned to increase exposure to Internet-based publications.

Unfortunately, the only FlashFictionOnline.com and other flash stories qualified by the rules for this award are those whose length happens to be exactly 1000 words. That length is the minimum for the award and the maximum for an FFO story. If they want to make the award inclusive for flash fiction, perhaps they should lower the minimum to 800 words. That's not a huge change to the rules, yet opens up a fairly large body of flash fiction. I suspect that many 1100-1500 word stories that were crunched to fit the flash fiction market were improved.