When I can I like to take part in some of the weekly flash fiction (micro fiction in some cases really) competitions and challenges that are out on ye olde ‘net. Like most of my writing though my participation has been very limited over the last 5 weeks or so. Happily I managed to write something for two of the challenges this week.
The first one was the new Monday Mixer hosted by Jeffrey Hollar at The Latinum Vault. I posted my entry for this one the other day here. I’m happy to say that it won a bit of distinction as this week’s overachiever (for using more than the required 3 of 12 prompt words, and not hurting the story in the process). At least I think that’s what I won. Everyone on Twitter seemed to be congratulating me for the Best Use of Prompt award, so there might be some confusion there but I’m happy with either distinction. I’m just glad the story was well received.
Also this week I entered the Thursday Threads competition hosted by Siobhan Mur at “The Weird, the Wild, & the Wicked“. This has been the flash competition that I’ve had the most success with. I’m not sure why, maybe I do better with sentence prompts than with picture prompts? Anyway, this week I became a two-time winner of the challenge. I’ve previously had an honorable mention and a win in this competition. I also wrote a story for Thursday Threads that I finished after the deadline but liked enough to post here. Looking back I can honestly say I’ve really loved the stories I’ve written for this competition. Here is the new story that won it for me this week. I’m really happy with it too and might blog a bit about it tomorrow. For now I give it to you to read if you’d be so inclined (it’s less than 250 words):
A collection of quarks, who had decided to explore the universe as a proton, stopped one day to talk with the star Sol. As usually happens when cosmic entities of immense ego set to talking a great argument broke out about their relative importance. And here it should be noted that ego is a very special quantum phenomena: its size bears no correlation to the size of the entity that generates it; the quark collective was certainly equal to the star in that respect.
Sol felt its importance could be shown by its accomplishments. “For,” it said, “ I know of no other of my family who sustains a planet brimming with biological life.”
The quarks scoffed, guffawed and showed a great disdain for Sol’s argument. Their case came down, as it always does with quark collectives in a way most other cosmic entities found both aggravatingly predictable, and a tad unfair, to their vital role as universal building blocks. “Indeed, there is nothing without us,” they said. “We band together to make everything. You may be like a god to your puny planet home of biological life, but we are so much more.”
“In fact,” one quark said. “As far as I’m concerned, we are God.”
At that very moment however, a tiny boson popped into existence and chirped, “Sorry, that job’s taken.” And then it flew off, leaving behind a spluttering star and a stammering quark collective who truly had nothing they could say to that.