Top of the world, ma …

Some of you may have heard the news already.

The results are in for the 1st Quarter Writers of the Future competition and my short story, Coward’s Steel, won third prize.

This is not your average neighborhood speculative fiction contest.

I was told that there were more than one thousand SF entrants for 1st Quarter, from all over the English-speaking world. Third prize netted me $500 in cash, a slick-looking trophy, participation in a week-long expenses-paid writers’ workshop in California and — this is the one I like — publication in the 26th annual edition of the Writers’ of the Future XXVI anthology, summer 2010.

The competition is administered by Author Services, an offshoot of the Hubbard Foundation.  Joni Lebaqui, program administrator, and the folks at Author Services are a swell bunch.

Joni called Thursday morning to tell me I had won and I babbled for ten or fifteen minutes, while she listened. Thanks for your patience and understanding, Joni.

First place went to Tom Crosshill of New York for Seeing Double and second place went to Alex Black of Oregon for Lisa with Child. Winners of the competition have gone on to publish some two hundred fifty novels and two thousand five-hundred short stories.

Check it out at Writers of the Future. It is well worth the effort of entering.

BTW, the win marks my second professional-rates sale. The first was At Both Ends, which is set to appear soon at Flash Fiction Online. I’m please to say that the two sales meet one of my goals for the year!

Wherever the muse may take me

I have been remiss about keeping my words written meter up to date.

There are a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time working on 10Flash, the genre flash fiction e-zine I’m starting up July 1st. That is moving along quite well. I’ve received six of the issue’s ten stories, and have them entered and formatted, with the other four promised “soon”.

Just five more weeks and I am chuffed about that.

Second, I’ve been writing, but I’ve only finished one story since mid-April, a piece of flash I wrote Thursday night I am calling, We Who Are Ernest Now Salute You.

I do have three others in the works, though, hopscotching from one to the other as the Muse strikes me.

Doctor Sue’s Dr. Seuss is about half-way home, at 2,700 words; One Last Kiss, at 4,900 words, is all but done and A Prayer to Saint Barbara is about 3,000 words away from being finished. I’ve got 5,300 words written there.

But I keep getting interrupted by ideas. Good ideas that I just can’t tell to come back sometime next Thursday afternoon because I’m busy at the moment. If I say that, they may go away and never return.

And it is so strange, don’t you think, where ideas come from. If I had to explain, I couldn’t do it. I had another one hit me last night. I’m calling it Alice, When She’s Ten Feet Tall. I did 1,500 words, with another 1,500-2,500 to come soon — I hope.

Here’s the start:

Most days, Alice felt as if she were sneaking about in a world overrun by midgets.

It wasn’t just that she was so much larger than everyone else, even at her smallest. Everyone seemed preoccupied with their little worries, as well. No one had time to offer sympathy for Alice’s big problems. All they did was look up at her and run away, screaming. Such petty behavior.

Tom Petty. Serengeti. Try to hold it steady, Betty.

That was the other thing that Dodgson’s pills had inflicted upon her. A repetition and rhyming of certain words, over and over again in her mind until she had to say them aloud or go bonkers. It was called obsessive- compulsive behavior; Alice knew that, she had read it once in a book. And it wasn’t always easy to read these days. But Alice stuck with it, even when the books were smaller than the palm of her hand.

After all, it was the one thing she had to do to pass the time.

So, I’ll catch up my meter first chance. And I have stories soon to be published — one at Big Pulp, another at Flash Fiction Online and a third at Morpheus Tales. I’ll let you know when they’re available for you to peruse.

Hope those of you who live in the States have a swell Memorial Day weekend and that the rest of you have clear skies and warm weather.

At fear and trembling

My flash fiction, Hack, is now live at Fear and Trembling.

If you live in an apartment, or can recall the days when you did, you should be able to understand just how deeply the incessant cough from the neighbor’s place borrows under the skin of the story’s protagonist.

Check it out, if you like, and let me know what you think.

Check it out on 051209

“I have a great idea for a story.  We could make millions, if you’d just help me write it down.”

Ever hear that from someone you just met?  If you haven’t and you tell people often enough that you are a writer, you will.  Raincoaster talks about the woes of admitting you write at Everyone needs an editor!

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scottbourne at photofocus.com comments on What Photographers Can Learn From the New Star Trek.  Writers would do well to heed his suggestions, too.

Notions about flash fiction

Most professional writers agree that standard manuscript format means double line spacing, one-inch margins and Courier typeface (because each letter takes up the same space on a line).

The other standard that seems to be settling in is that maximum length for flash fiction is one thousand words.

If we use those two standards, we arrive at a manuscript length for flash fiction of four to five pages. Maybe six, if there are a lot of short paragraphs and plenty of white space.

You would think that any experienced writer could knock that out over a weekend and still have time for Sunday morning brunch. You would be wrong.

Working as a slush reader over the past four months for Every Day Fiction has shown me how many writers, who think they can write flash, just don’t have a clue.

Wading through the slush, we see bits and pieces of stories. Anecdotes. Aphorisms. But only one in ten is a complete story and one in twenty or thirty is a good complete story.

Yes, you say, but many of those submissions are from writers still learning the craft. Maybe, but the sad truth is that even experienced writers struggle with flash. Many experienced writers can’t write anything less than novel length.

Best-selling novelist James Michener is supposed to have said, “In six pages I can’t even say hello.” He has lots of company.

Since last June, I’ve written fifty pieces of flash fiction, about one a week. Some I’m still polishing. Some I have retired; I call them dead soldiers. Twenty four have been accepted for publication, most of which have appeared in print.

And here are some notions about flash I have developed over the past year; no hard and fast rules or standards, just notions that work for me:

• Keep character count low; no more than three. The story feels crowded if there are more.
• Don’t give any character a name or description unless you want readers to pay attention to the character. Readers have different expectations after being introduced to Millie Roberts, the red-head at the register, than for the check-out clerk. And it’s fewer words.
• Make every word says just what you want it to say. I know you’ve heard this one before but you can’t hear it too many times. You have a thousand words and precision cuts to the heart of a thing with speed and clarity.
• Slash most adjectives and ALL adverbs. Be ruthless. You can smother a noun in modifiers, cut the courage right out of it, and any verb that needs modifiers can be replaced by a stronger verb. Ran rapidly and scrambled mean the same thing and scrambled sounds exciting.
• Write about our world. You must explain special rules for a fantasy world and that chews up word count. It can be done, Every Day Fiction has present some marvelous fantasy flash, but it’s difficult to pull off and should be set aside unless there is no other way to tell the tale.
• Focus on small events. One man battling a nest of hornets he stumbles upon in his backyard is no less dramatic, has no less conflict, than a score of soldiers engaged in jungle combat.
• Be aware of word count every second you write. People say, “I can always come back when I’m done and trim it down.” Maybe so, but many can’t. It’s easier to keep track of the ticking meter along the way.
• For God’s sake, edit. Submitting a first draft is lazy. You can scrub the life out of a story, of course, but nothing is so brilliant that it can’t benefit from a bit of polish.