When I discovered the Flash Lit Fiction Hashtag #FLF13 on Twitter, it was the 14th of September and I knew I would only have eleven days to throw in a few Tweets into the mix.Well, in the end, I managed, in between, writing lectures and general family stuff, to write sixteen of these little 140 character stories. I didn't plan on writing so many, but there were so many other inspirational tweeted stories that I just kept writing them.
To my surprise, on the night of the 26th, one of my Tweeted stories was short-listed and in a short two-hour window of frenetic voting, I managed to rally enough support to garner 25% of the votes and finished 2nd. So thank-you to everybody who rallied to my cause and thank-you to everybody who said so many nice things about my Tweeted stories in the run up to the short-listing and after the results were announced.Special mention to Tom Briars who actually won the competition with a fantastic entry, which can be found here (along with the other short-listed Tweets/stories).[Ignore the fact that the Poll might say I've won, it was still taking votes after the competition actually closed.]**I would also like to add that the feedback to my most recent appearance on Paragraph Planet has provoked the most positive response I've ever had. It's an interesting little story, not just in content, but in its history. It started life, about twenty years ago, as a short story that got a bit out of hand. Over the years as I revisited it, it grew in size and complexity until I realised I'd painted myself into a corner with the plot (the danger of rewriting over a long time, even for a short-story/novella) and I didn't have the skill, imagination or will to fix it. So, like many of my projects in my 20s it got quietly pushed into the electronic graveyard of the archive on my hard drive.
The 75-worder that appeared on Paragraph Planet is therefore the blurb on the back of a book which doesn't actually exist. Yet. And I say yet because I think, when I've cleared the decks of my other projects, I may take the essence of this story and start it again. I think I'm a skilled enough writer now to keep the plot tight and in check, it may not even reach novella size, but I would like to see what I can turn it into now, after it and I have matured over the last 15 years or so since I pretended I'd never started it...