Entering flash fiction competitions

I am a firm believer that in order to write well you have to read a lot, and not just a lot of one type of story, but a lot of every type of story. One way I get my daily fix is from Every Day Fiction, which drops a nice piece of flash fiction into my inbox every day. Sometimes I'm not particularly impressed with what I read, and other times I can't stop thinking about the stories, but because they come from writers all over the world they're always different.

I've mentioned EDF before because I submitted a couple of stories to them last year, but this week they're running a competition to write a flash fiction of up to 250 words based on a 10 word prompt. I've just submitted my entry for the competition, entitled 'Purity', and I hope I'll be able to submit another as well before the competition closes on Sunday.

If anyone would like to have a go at the competition, the details are here.

Tips from Children's Author Catherine Cooper

A couple of weeks ago I interviewed children's author Catherine Cooper about her novel The Golden Acorn: The Adventures of Jack Brenin. She started off as a self-published author selling 1,500 copies in a year - a tremendous achievement for any self-published author. But then she entered the Brit Writers' Award and her publishing fortunes changed.

Here are the two halves of the interview: A Self-Publishing Success Story: Award Winner Catherine Cooper and Realising a Writing Dream: Children's Author Catherine Cooper

I don't know about you, but after reading a success story like that, I'm feeling inspired!

Flash fiction competition and updates

Lots of updates here, so sorry for dotting around all over the place.

First, I found an interesting competition for flash fiction while I was browing the web this week. The 30 word story contest is being run by SmokeLong Quarterly to celebrate it's 30th issue, and runs throughout November. There's no entry fee, you can submit up to three entries, and the prize is publication in a special 30th edition of the magazine.
It says: "This is what we'll be looking for in the stories submitted for our contest - very short gems that are sparse, yet evocative."

The creative writing course is going really well and the first assignment is due in this week. If you want to try out what we have to do, you have to do a 200-300 word freewrite on one of a choice of subjects and then use that as the basis for a 750 word piece of fiction. I'm not going to post up the topics here just in case it's not allowed by the university, but last year's themes have included a search; learning to swim; a scrapyard; hearing a piano; and a bunch of keys.

The final very quick update is that I've now managed to keep my streak on 750words.com going for 39 days, and at 30 I became an 'albatross'. Lucky me. I get a phoenix if I can keep it up for 100 days.

Yes, it may just be a very small little image, but it's amazing what an incentive it can be!

The six word competition

I decided at the start of the year that I wanted to enter more writing competitions to give myself targets. The Arvon Foundation's six word story competition caught my attention today. Here are my attempts:

Competition entered, judges awed, prize given.

Rope knotted, chair kicked away. Goodbye.

I've also entered the Txtlit competition - write a story within the length of a text message. I seem to be veering towards microfic/flashfic at the moment...