This isn’t a rant, but a serious question: why wouldn’t you name your main character within the first sentence or so? So many stories (especially short-short stories) have only “he” or “she” as the main character; some will start with the pronoun and then give the name later. But a name is so powerful! Consider […]
An amusing bit by William Meikle on sffworld.com. 🙂
I just saw this good news for our January contributor Stefanie Freele: she has beaten out 89 other competitors to become Smokelong Quarterly’s Fish Fellow. Congratulations, Stefanie!
I’m pretty good-natured, so none of the following have stopped me from reading your stories, but consider what an editor might think on reading the following statements in the email that accompanies your submission: “I wrote this in 20 minutes after finding out about your zine.” While I appreciate the fact that you want to […]
Many authors write stories with twists. For a while, Law and Order even advertised the fact that there was a twist at the end of their episodes. The problem with twist endings and flash is that they often don’t feel like twists: they feel like punch lines. And that makes the stories jokes, not stories. […]
I just stumbled across a year-old post by Steve Goble called “Swords and Flashery“. It hits on a topic I’ve been thinking about as I go through the submissions we’ve received over the last two months. [After writing the first draft of a fantasy flash,] I read the [2000-word] piece and found nary an ounce […]
…not that I’m intimating that they’re closely related or anything. 😉 This post is for writers rather than readers. Over the past six weeks we’ve received about 300 submissions. Thanks to everyone who has given us a try, and I’d like to offer my encouragement even to those whose stories I’ve rejected. It looks like […]
Mark, a member of the editorial team, enjoyed Boleslaw Prus’s Mold of the Earth quite a bit. It highlighted something interesting about the relationship of allegory and symbolism. He wrote an essay about that relationship, and I liked it enough to publish it, so here it is.
Guy Hogan has been encouraging us here at FFO since the day we went live — thanks very much, Guy. He runs a blog at http://flashfictionnow.blogspot.com, and I want to highlight one really interesting thing he’s doing: picking apart Hemingway as a flash writer. You can find the Hemingway series tagged here: http://flashfictionnow.blogspot.com/search/label/Hemingway I especially […]