The blog has been a little quiet lately. Every time something new comes into my life, it pushes out something else, and this blog has, unfortunately, been a low priority for me.

This time it was the flash game Evony. I’m not linking to it because it’s extremely addictive, and I’m going cold turkey. I was good at this game. Very good. But it was consuming my life, so I dropped it. I feel bad, but feeling bad is what addiction is all about, and I am a video game addict.

Anyways, I finally got around to writing a piece for KC Ball’s flash fiction magazine 10Flash. Normally, I avoid subbing to new magazines because they tend to fold like a cheap suit, or have such low readership my work doesn’t get seen, and with my limited writing time I need all the exposure I can get.

Ball’s project was different for several reasons. One, I got specifically invited and KC is a friend. I want to both support her venture and don’t want to let her down. Two, KC is no unknown. She is a heck of a writer herself, having recently won 3rd place in Writers of the Future, which, as I have said before, is completely equivalent to 1st place. Once you place that highly, 1st, 2nd, and 3rd are determined by chance (for instance, whether your story resonated with the particular judges that read it. The judges change from quarter to quarter, so the person who reads your piece is determine… by chance). Three, KC has been a huge supported of MY labour of love, EDF. I can honestly say that the magazine wouldn’t function without her help in the slush.

Anyways, about the specific project, 10Flash is a prompt-driven magazine which is a bit of an experiment that I think could only work in flash fiction. Prompt-driven magazines for longer works (short story length) have failed in the past for lack of quality submissions among other reasons, but with flash, writers can churn out stories in hours (mine took 2.5), so the investment of time you’re chancing is minimal.

The prompt this time was “a librarian on vacation in a foreign land”. I kind of bent that prompt a little as I usually do, but the piece turned out quite well. I actually choked myself up a little as I wrote it, and that’s a pretty good sign.

I’ll post again when the piece actually debuts. I know a lot of my EDF regulars have been burning and yearning to read my work, and this is an opportunity to see if the old man can actually practice what he preaches. Until then, I promise to keep the blog up a little more!

Tags: 10 Flash, EDF, KC Ball, my work

This is so cool. I’m going to be there. And in the running for the Grand Prize. Having read some of the other winners, I don’t think I stand much of a chance… but one can dream. After all, dreaming is what prompted me to enter the darn contest.

Tags: Writers of the Future

At EDF, we get a lot of “Dialogue only” stories. These are stories with zero description, just (at minimum) two characters talking to each other.

I can count on one hand how many of them we’ve ever accepted (and have fingers to spare).

The biggest reason for rejection? Both voices sounded the same. With dialogue only stories, you’re basically saying, as a writer, that you’re so good at writing dialogue that you don’t need all that mundane stuff like description, setting, and plot. You can do it all in the spoken word. Well, if you can’t even make two character sound different from each other, you’re in trouble. As an editor, I should be able to point to a random line of dialogue and say, oh, that’s character A speaking. I can tell because of his/her (way of speaking/accent/personality/etc).

Other good reasons for rejection are:

• You’ve inserted a random line of description at the end. If you have description at all, you need it everywhere. Otherwise it just looks like you tried to write a dialogue only story and failed.
• More than two characters. Two is hard enough. I’ve never seen a successful dialogue only story with three characters. The reader just gets confused.
• Info dumps. Just because it’s in dialogue, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
• The story sucks. A “clever” format like dialogue-only can’t save this.

Anyways, dialogue only pieces make for great exercises, but poor stories. Disagree? Prove me wrong. And then submit that proof to EDF’s slush pile.

Tags: EDF, The craft

Like every market on earth, Every Day Fiction responds to our authors by e-mail. They enter that e-mail address on our submission form, and without fail, despite numerous promises that we won’t spam you, some idiot enters his address at gmail with a +everydayfiction on the end (so it looks like idiotauthor+everydayfiction@gmail.com).

Gmail has the feature that anything after the + sign gets ignored, so our return e-mail addressed to idiotauthor+everydayfiction@gmail.com will actually go to idiotauthor@gmail.com. And if we start spamming him, he can just block any incoming e-mail with +everydayfiction in the destination address field, and BAM! he’s foiled us! How clever!

This is stupid on many levels.

1. Why the heck would you submit to a market that you think is going to SPAM you??? There has to be a relationship of trust between author and publisher (after all, you turn over your precious creative content to them, how is you e-mail address worth more than that?).
2. Any spam bot in the WORLD can just strip that + off the e-mail address before it sends out spam. IT’S ONE LINE OF CODE.

So all you’ve really done by adding that + is

1. not protected yourself against SPAM, and
2. demonstrated a stunning lack of rational thought.

My advice, avoid this whole debate. Only submit to markets that you trust.

Tags: Rants

I see this kind of thing a lot in the slush these days. The author eschews the actual story, and instead paints us an elaborate picture of what happened after the action. Obviously, this is common in flash, because often the inciting incident cannot be written in few enough words to qualify as flash.

We’ve published a few of these kinds of pieces, but often they just don’t work. There’s an insidious little trap that authors seem to fall into with regularity, and it is this: “When writing an aftermath piece, the situation described must be more interesting or powerful than the inciting incident”. Otherwise, the whole time you audience is reading the story they’re thinking, “wow that would have been cool to read about”.

To use a real life example, imagine you arrived at an intersection. Firefighters are hosing away stains on the street and you can just see a tow truck driving away towing something you just can’t make out. You ask a bystander what happened and he goes nuts, “Holy cow, I can’t believe you missed it! There was this wild elephant chasing a peanut truck and it ran into a wig factory and there was hair EVERYWHERE!”

You’d feel a little disappointed that you’d missed the action wouldn’t you? In an aftermath story, you’re going to have to overcome that with your readers.

How do you overcome it? Well, that’s really market dependent. In some markets (usually pulp markets) if your inciting incident was a bullets blazing, fist shaking brawl, you’ll never be able to overcome reader disappointment. They’ll want to read about that fight. However, if you’re targeting a literary market, they’re much more concerned with the emotional impact that that kind of violence would have. Give them a little angst and heartbreak, and they’re much more likely to forgive you for skipping the action.

Once again, it comes down to effective story placement. Know your market, and you just might be one of the ones who can pull off a perfect aftermath story.

Tags: The craft