Category: News

We've still got several hours left of our veritable flood of flash over at FlashFlood, National Flash Fiction Day's curated journal; we've been publishing a flash every five to ten minutes since 00:01 and will continue to midnight BST.

However, there's even more to look forward to tomorrow!

Join us from 8:00 a.m. BST at FlashFlood for our latest Community Flash Series.  We're catching up with the Writers Group from Wandsworth Carers Centre, a charity that provides support to unpaid carers. They've provided us with thirteen brand-new flashes written by carers who are exploring flash as a means of finding time for themselves, self-expression, and coping with the demands of caring.

We'll post an introduction to the series at 8:00 a.m. BST and then one story every hour on the hour through 9:00 p.m.

A huge thank you to the Wandsworth Carers Centre Writers Group for sharing this work with us!

We're thrilled to be launching our eleventh National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, And We Lived Happily Ever After, edited by Karen Jones and Christopher Drew.

We're celebrating with a virtual anthology launch, online from 7 p.m. BST on Facebook.  From 7 p.m., four videos of anthology readings will be posted every quarter of an hour.  You are welcome to participate, whether or not you're on Facebook.  Join us for a chat and some readings from the anthology.

Click here to join in the online launch.

If you can't make it this evening, fear not; the videos will be available to watch any time after that here.

And of course, if you haven't already, you can buy your copy of And We Lived Happily Ever After at our Bookshop.

Huge thanks to Anita Goveas and Farhana Khalique for their brilliant workshop this morning.  If you missed out, then you're in luck:

Click here for a recording of today's session.

You'll need to enter the password jz?^tq0H to access the workshop.

The link to the handout is here: NFFD 2022 Writing Workshop with Anita Goveas and Farhana Khalique - handout.

We are truly grateful to Anita and Farhana for offering their annual National Flash Fiction Day workshop free of charge for two years running.  All NFFD projects are volunteer run, this included.  If you enjoy these free workshops, you can go even deeper with Anita and Farhana's two-part workshop series this autumn:

Biryani Flash: building up the layers of flash fiction

• Part 1: Saturday, 10 September 2022, 11:00 - 13:00 BST
• Part 2: Saturday, 8 October 2022, 11:00 - 13:00 BST

Each part has a different focus and build on each other, but you can also take either part individually.  We recommend snapping up your place; prices are rock-bottom so that the workshops remain as accessible as possible.

Thank you again to Anita and Farhana for volunteering their time and expertise to the flash community today!

In the spring of 2020, with the onset of COVID-19 lockdowns in the US, writer and performance maker Rachel Jendrzejewski taught two versions of an online class called How to Write When You Don’t Feel Like It through the Playwrights' Center and Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Today, with many of us still struggling to find the energy to write, she's sharing her notes with National Flash Fiction Day in a five-part, text-based, self-guided mini-course.

You can find everything on our How to Write When You Don't Feel Like It page.

Rachel Jendrzejewski is a writer based in Minneapolis. You can find her online at www.rachelka.com

photo credit: matt regan

Just in case you weren't busy enough at The Write-In, as part of National Flash Fiction Day 2022, Michael Loveday, author of the craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript (Ad Hoc Fiction 2022), has been kind enough to share a three-part writing prompt with us that might help kick-start a novella-in-flash from individual flashes....

Scene Afterwards/Scene Beforehand

New sparks can arise when we use one flash fiction as a catalyst for another, and connect them into an extended sequence. As part of National Flash Fiction Day celebrations, why not try the following writing prompt…

PART ONE:
Set aside some time and space to think laterally and imaginatively.

Focus your attention upon one favourite flash that you’ve already written.

(You might like to pick one that you’ve previously submitted to a NFFD anthology, competition, or to Flash Flood; and/or you might pick a flash fiction containing a character or situation that you’re particularly fond of, or curious about.)

PART TWO:
EITHER:

(a) Imagine a moment/an action/an event taking place some time after the scene in the original flash, and write a new flash using the same character(s) as a foundation.

You might set the new scene in the same location or situation, but allow some time to have elapsed in between (it’s up to you how much), so it feels like this new flash is beginning afresh in a new moment.

OR:

(b) Imagine a moment/an action/an event taking place before the original flash. Again, write a scene using the same character(s) as a foundation, maintaining a time gap between the two pieces.

Across the source flash and the newly generated flash, allow the story/situation to move forward. Let one flash develop the ingredients that are in the other. Explore what’s beyond the margins of the source flash.
Depending on whether the new scene is set before or after, consider:

• Where must the character(s) have been previously or inevitably go afterwards?
• Who with?
• Seeing, doing, and experiencing what?

We might say the resulting pair of scenes creates ‘fragmented continuity’.
If you enjoy this tactic, consider using the process again (creating more ‘beforehand’ scenes or more ‘afterwards’ scenes). Do this as many times as feels right for your material.

PART THREE:
Cultivate a list of such scenes you could develop for the story material. Again, explore beyond the margins of the existing material, or follow up any threads (character, setting, plot situation, etc) you glimpse within it.

Could this list of scenes grow into a novella-in-flash?

A novella-in-flash is a short novel composed of individual but linked flash fictions – each section/chapter/story is fewer than 1,000 words long – in which the individual parts build towards a bigger whole.

The story arc for a novella-in-flash tends to be composed of individual moments, presented with spaces and pauses in between, rather than using the unified and continuous narrative arc of a traditional novel or novella.

Allow your chosen story situation to take up room in your creative brain: deliberately welcome in this flash fiction as a resident for a longer period than you’ve allowed before, and begin some daydreaming…

Michael Loveday writes fiction, poetry, and non-fiction. His hybrid novella Three Men on the Edge (V. Press, 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Saboteur Award for Best Novella. In 2018 he began publishing a series of articles about the history and form of the novella-in-flash at SmokeLong Quarterly, and in Spring 2022 his craft guide Unlocking the Novella-in-Flash: from Blank Page to Finished Manuscript was published by Ad Hoc Fiction. He coaches artists, writers, and creative freelancers one-to-one, and edits novella-in-flash manuscripts through his mentoring programme at www.novella-in-flash.com.  Find him on Twitter at @pagechatter.

Photo by Kyle Glenn on Unsplash.

We're beyond thrilled that Anita Goveas and Farhana Khalique are joining us again this year with another free workshop.  Places have now sold out, but we'll be posting the workshop later on for everyone to enjoy.

In the meantime, you can access last year's workshop with this link to the Zoom session, using the passcode 'Z@fs5ZkM' (without the quotation marks).

Here is a link to the handout:

NFFD Workshop - Layers in Flash with Farhana Khalique and Anita Goveas

Huge thanks again to Farhana Khalique and Anita Goveas for running the workshop and sharing the materials with us!

Farhana Khalique is a writer, voiceover artist and teacher from London. Her stories are forthcoming or have appeared in the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2021, Leicester Writes Short Story Prize Anthology 2020, Reflex Fiction and more. Farhana has been shortlisted for The Asian Writer Short Story Prize, and she has won a Word Factory Apprentice Award. She is also the editor of Desi Reads and a submissions editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Find Farhana @HanaKhalique and www.farhanakhalique.com.

Anita Goveas is British-Asian and based in London. She’s on the editorial team at Flashback Fiction, an editor at Mythic Picnic’s twitter zine, and she’s an editor for the FlashFlood. She is one of the teachers on Dahlia Publishing’s 2021 ‘A Brief Pause‘ writer’s development programme. Her debut flash collection Families and Other Natural Disasters was published by Reflex Press in Sept 2020. Find her at @coffeeandpaneer and https://coffeeandpaneer.wordpress.com/.

We thrilled to introduce our newest anthology, And We Lived Happily Ever After: National Flash Fiction Day Anthology 2022, edited by Karen Jones and Chris Drew.

Buy your copy now from the NFFD Bookshop!

This year, we invite you to explore more than fifty excellent stories on the theme of 'freedom', as well as the wonderful winning stories from the 2022 Microfiction Competition.

Huge thanks to editors Karen Jones and Chris Drew, our authors and prize winners as well as everyone who sent us stories to read.

Huge thanks as well to John at Ad Hoc Fiction who took on the massive job of typesetting the anthology for free, as a gift to the flash fiction community.  We can't express how grateful we are!

We also extend our heartfelt thanks to:

• Our competition judges Christopher Allen, Joanna Campbell, Tracy Fells and Damhnait Monaghan
• Artist-in-Residence Jeanette Sheppard who created the cover image
• Our donors and benefactors, Jude Higgins, James Northern, Stephen Patchett, and Jenny Woodhouse, as well as everyone who donated to the project.  Your support allows us to keep submissions free an accessible to all contributors.
• Our wonderful team of proofreaders

Like all of National Flash Fiction Day's projects, the anthology is a volunteer-run labour of love.  We are grateful to everyone who has given their time and expertise to make it all happen.

Join us tonight at 7pm for our online launch on Facebook (you don't need to be on Facebook to participate).  We'll be chatting and posting videos of readings from the anthology.  Videos will be available to watch here after the event.

You may know about FlashFlood, National Flash Fiction Day's curated online journal, but did you know that 2022 marks the fourth year of our Debut Flash Series?

Each year, we reserve slots for unpublished flash writers and, starting from 6:30 a.m. BST, we'll be publishing debut flash at half past the hour until midnight.  We've got over fifteen first flashes to celebrate today, and we're honoured and excited to be sharing them with you.

If you see 'Debut Flash' at the start of the title over at FlashFlood, it's an author's first published flash (and often their first published piece of any kind).

Happy Publication Day to all our debut authors, and to our former debut authors who have returned to publish with us again this year!

The Official NFFD 2022 Roadmap

And there's even more still....

We are thrilled to announce that today is publication day for Joanna Campbell’s wonderful novella-in-flash, Sybilla. Joanna won our Novella-in-Flash Award back in January with her historical novella set in bookshop next to the Wall in West Berlin.

Sybilla is now officially on sale at the NFFD Bookshop.

All of us at National Flash Fiction Day love this masterclass in the novella-in-flash form, but you don't have to take our word for it.  Here's what others had to say about Sybilla:

This novella-in-flash is a little gem … seamless storytelling.

— Sophie van Llewyn, Novella-in-Flash judge and author of Bottled Good

Beautifully written, atmospheric, and impeccably paced this is a book I’ll be thinking about for a long time. Campbell is a master of the form.

— Angela Readman, author of The Girls are Pretty Crocodiles

To celebrate, we've posted a couple videos of Joanna reading from Sybilla on our YouTube channel, and you can also read Jeanette Sheppard's Q&A with Joanna here.

Finally, to whet your appetite, we'll leave you with a little taste of what it's all about....

One August morning, the people of West Berlin wake to find their world divided. In the shadow of the Wall, Lara works in a bookshop where customers come and go, bringing regular news about loved ones trapped on the other side. Some strive to maintain connections via telephone and letters, while others plan a more desperate course of action. When a thunderstorm looms over the bookshop, a new customer takes shelter, bringing with him a story that Lara cannot ignore.

Sybilla is a story of separation, betrayal, and ultimately, the power of love.