Fireside Fiction Issue 24 went live today and it includes my flash piece “All of Our Days“. I’m quite proud of the story and I’m thrilled it’s appearing in Fireside, a market I love to support myself, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post. Also in this issue are stories from Malon Edwards (which has an excellent piece of Galen Dara art to go with it) and Alex Hughes. Finally, Lilith Saintcrow has the 9th installment of her serial “She Wolf and Cub”. If you haven’t been following along you’ll need to go back to Issue 16 to start that from the beginning.
Category Archives: Flash Fiction
Flash Fiction: The Invisible Encyclopedia
Hey folks! It’s been awhile since I did one of these but over at Terribleminds awesome author Chuck Wendig has launched his first flash fiction challenge of the new year. In this case we were offered two lists of 20 items each. Roll a die or use a random number generator to pick a word off each list and voila – you have your flash fiction title. Oh, and you can add “The” as needed.
So I rolled and ended up with “The Invisible Encyclopedia”. Read, enjoy.
The Invisible Encyclopedia
You might call it, and some have of course, Monopsychism, Unus Mundus, the Collective Unconscious, or the World Soul, but we call it The Invisible Encyclopedia and it’s in danger. Someone out there has gone into business for themselves. We don’t know who they are; we call them The Editor. My name is Ha Sung Hwa and along with my friends Lila Molesky and Basel Rizk we’re hunting The Editor.
We’re trying to anyway, but it has NOT been going well.
Some Micro-Fiction For Monday Mixer
So as my first “new content” now that I’m back I offer up an answer to this week’s Monday Mixer Challenge from The Latinum Vault. In a Monday mixer you must choose a noun, verb and adjective from the lists provided and use them in a bit of micro-fiction exactly 150 words long. This week I chose the noun slew, the verb ensorcell and the adjective vainglorious. According to Scrivener it’s 150 words.
The Fall of Agashan
The reign of Agashan, Lord of Stars, was a terrible time. A tyrant, Agashan wielded the mightiest of magics in his rise to dominance. He needed no army. Ensorcelled by the sorcerer family member fought family member, neighbor cursed neighbor. Hardened soldiers fell at the wave of his hand. Indeed, when some few of us so-called heroes came to face him on the fields of Talshin he but flicked his wrist and the slew of the land beneath our feet fell us. Toppled and strewn about, we looked up in awe at the sorcerer. Agashan’s power was awesome, indeed, but he had became vainglorious. Too certain of his position, he never saw, while we lay on the ground at his feet, the tiny Gorip, the frogling prince, leap from tall grass to drive an almost invisibly slim blade into the back of his neck, ending his terrible reign forever.
Some Weird Flash Fiction
I’ve got a new flash fiction story here for you. This is another response to a Chuck Wendig Friday Flash Fiction Challenge. He provided a list of 10 words and we had to choose 5. They weren’t just to appear as words in the story but to become five elements of the story. I chose the words library, undertaker, cube, envelope and storm.
The result makes me want to run out and watch a David Lynch movie. If that’s the sort of vibe you like then perhaps you’ll enjoy a story of
The Day The Undertaker Came
The Undertaker came to The Library at the beginning of the end. He came to prepare us, though we didn’t know it at the time. He wore sable robes that swallowed light and dimmed the corridors as he walked through them. If he had a face we never saw it; he kept his hood pulled high and forward like an opaque veil.
A Terribleminds Flash Fiction Challenge: More random elements
Regular drill here. I wrote this story in response to a Chuck Wendig flash fiction challenge. It’s a little longer than usual because this time our word limit was raised to 1500. And I’m glad it was because the first draft, which I just wrote over the last couple hours all in one go, came in at 2000! I took my editors scalpel to it though and pared it down to just under the limit. As usual I’ll give you the details on the random elements I got after the story.
The Box
Our family’d had the box forever. As a kid I’d felt unreasonably proud about it. No other family in Bunker Complex 10 had one like it.
Looking back I realize it was a stupid thing to be proud of. It wasn’t even useful. It didn’t open, so you couldn’t put anything inside it. It was practically sacred to us, so you couldn’t use it for a table or desk. No, it just sat there taking up space. I was proud all the same. Who wouldn’t be proud to own something that could save the world.
Some Micro Fiction for #MondayMixer
It’s been awhile since I wrote some flash/micro fiction for one of the weekly contests. This little story is for entry over at The Latinum Vault for their Monday Mixer contest. It had to be exactly 150 words and include a location, thing and adjective chosen from lists provided. I picked cabana, cabachon and intrinsic.
Here’s the story (untitled):
Tony Twist lounged poolside in his cabana. It looked well stocked with top-shelf booze, quality girls and low-class thugs.
Looked fun, but his smile disappeared when he saw me. “Drake, I’ve been waiting. I’m not good at waiting,” he said.
“Looks like you do it well enough.”
“You got any leads yet?”
“Better,” I said and took out the cool stone from my pocket. His eyes went saucer-wide before I tossed it over.
“The girl?”
“Settle for the cabachon, Tony. You got the pretty stone. Forget the pretty girl.”
“She was an intrinsic part of our deal.”
“So give me half of what we agreed and we’ll call it even.”
“She stole from me.”
“You’ll get over it. Payment in two days Tony, or she sings some songs downtown.”
I laughed as I walked away. Tony’d play, he’d bragged a bit too much to Claire not to.