It's time for Flash! Friday! Unfortunately, being out of town, I won't be able to participate for a few weeks. I'm bummed to miss the next few prompts, which are sure to inspire some fantastic stories, as always. Despite my being unable to participate (and writing this ahead of time), I do hope you will pop on over and try your hand at this fantastic contest, just for fun!
Flash fiction isn't my strong suit, and aside from a few class assignments as I finished my degree, I rarely wrote any flash fiction before discovering the Flash! Friday contests. I enjoy being descriptive and writing complex and full stories, as opposed to vivid vignettes. Still, flash fiction offers a wonderful chance to perfect saturating our words with as much meaning as possible, allowing the vignettes that make up those longer stories to be more vibrant and evocative. Each word must pull its own weight.
Flash! Friday offers a photo prompt to writers, as well as some rules for each specific week and a rotating set of judges. Personally, I make it a point not to read any stories before I have submitted my own, but I am regularly surprised by how many similar threads there are within our stories (predictable, I suppose, since a picture is worth 1000 words, and we usually get less than 250)—and even more so by the vast differences in the paths the participants' imaginations follow.
Around her passion for flash fiction, and a mild obsession with dragons, Rebekah has gathered a community, which contributes to and comments on each week's stories. Occasionally, after reading some of these pieces, I question why I consider myself a writer at all—my imagination simply isn't as unpredictable as these other writers', and my flash fiction stories don't strike me as equally rich as theirs. Then someone writes a lovely comment on my post, which boosts my confidence a bit.
Of course, those comments are all a matter of one person's opinion, but then again, the entire publishing industry is based on a sequence of individual opinions.
I will be out of town and away from my blog for a few weeks, but rest assured, I have some interesting guest posts lined up (and a smattering of my own posts pre-scheduled). I simply won't be able to respond promptly to comments, though I look forward to reading them all (subtle, I know) when I return!
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