News

National Flash Fiction Day kicks off in less than fourteen hours!  Here's what we've got going on tomorrow, and where you can find it.

FlashFlood

For 24 hours straight starting at 00:01 BST, we’re publishing one flash every 5 to 10 minutes over at NFFD’s online journal, FlashFlood.  Then, on Sunday, we're featuring work from the Wandsworth Carers Writers Group, the latest in our Community Flash series.

The Write-In

Over at NFFD’s The Write-In, we’re posting a flash prompt every hour on the hour from 00:00 – 24:00 BST on 26 June 2020. You have until 23:59 BST on Sunday, 27 June to submit your responses for a chance of publication.

Workshop: Layers in Flash Fiction
1:30pm-2:30pm BST, 26 June 2021

Due to popular demand we are looking into recording the workshop and making the recording freely available to all. We'll post more details as soon as we can!

In this free, one-hour workshop, Farhana Khalique and Anita Goveas will cover how you can use imagery, structures and titles to develop layers in your flash fiction.  Participants can look forward to a session packed with reading, writing exercises, and discussion.  Places for the live event have now gone, but we are trying to arrange to make a recording available for all.

The Great Festival Flash Off (externally run)
11:00am - 8:00pm BST, 26 June 2021
including 3:00pm-3:45pm: Special Flash Addict session with NFFD

The wonderful folks at the Flash Fiction Festival are running a full day of fantastic flash fiction programming.  Do have a look at their full schedule of events on 26 June and beyond.  The directors of National Flash Fiction Day UK will be joining them from 3:00 - 3:45pm to discuss the history of NFFD and read some flash from the archives.

2021 NFFD Anthology Launch
7:00pm BST, 26 June 2021

Join us from 7pm BST for the 2021 NFFD virtual anthology launch. Four videos of readings from the anthology will be posted every quarter of an hour. Everyone is welcome to view the videos here, chat with us at our FaceBook event and join us on Twitter @nationalflashfd to share the love.  Videos won't start appearing until 7:00pm BST on 26 June 2021, but they will be available to watch any time after that if you can't join us 'live' for the launch. All welcome!

Beyond 26 June...

Novella-in-Flash Panel
7:30pm-8:30pm BST, 30 July 2021

As part of our tenth year celebrations we are excited to announce a special event focused on the Novella-in-Flash, in plenty of time for anyone interested in submitting to our Novella-in-Flash Award.  Johanna Robinson, author of Homing (Ad Hoc Fiction), will be our host for the evening, and will be discussing novellas-in-flash with Dan Crawley, Eleanor Walsh, Karen Jones, Jupiter Jones, and Tom O’Brien.  (You can read more about everyone here.)  This online event is free to attend.  If you would like to receive a Zoom link please email Jeanette Sheppard at nffdnif@gmail.com.

And of course, keep an eye on our home page for an up-to-date list of submission windows for our various projects.

As part of our tenth year celebrations we are excited to announce a special event focused on the Novella-in-Flash. We’d love you to join us for our panel on Friday 30^th July (19:30 to 20:30 UK BST).

We are thrilled that Johanna Robinson, author of Homing (Ad Hoc Fiction), will be our host for the evening. We are equally thrilled to announce our panel members — Dan Crawley, Eleanor Walsh, Karen Jones, Jupiter Jones, and Tom O’Brien.  (You can read more about everyone below.)

There will be an opportunity to ask questions on the chat bar at the end of the evening. This online event is free to attend.  If you would like to receive a Zoom link please email Jeanette Sheppard at nffdnif@gmail.com.

Johanna Robinson is based near Liverpool, UK, and has been writing short fiction for around five years. Her work has been featured in various magazines and anthologies, including SmokeLong, Reflex Press and Mslexia. In 2020,  she won the TSS Cambridge Prize for Flash Fiction and the Bath Flash Fiction Award, and in 2019 Ad Hoc Fiction published her novella-in-flash Homing, which follows a Norwegian Resistance family in the Second World War. More of her work can be found at http://www.johanna-robinson.com and on Twitter @JohannaWordpool.

Jupiter Jones grew up on the north-west coasts of Cumberland and Lancashire. The first was wild and secretive, the second trashy and jaded; she loved them both and they haunt her writing. Following a brief spell in London to complete a PhD in Spectatorial Embarrassment at Goldsmiths, she now lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the winner of the Colm Tóibín International Prize, and her work has been published by Aesthetica, Brittle Star, Fish, Scottish Arts Trust, and rejected by many, many others. Her novella-in-flash The Death and Life of Mrs Parker was shortlisted in the Bath 2021 competition and will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction later this year, and Lovelace Flats was runner up in the Reflex Press novella competition and will be published in 2022. https://jupiter-jones.com

Karen Jones is a flash and short story writer from Glasgow, Scotland. She is a perennial long/short-lister – Commonwealth Short Story Competition, Bath Flash Fiction Award, Bath Short Story Award, To Hull and Back, TSS 400, HISSAC etc. – and has won prizes with Mslexia, Flash 500, Words With Jam, Ink Tears, Ad Hoc Fiction, Retreat West and won first prize in The Cambridge Flash Fiction Prize 2021. Her work is published in numerous ezines, magazines and anthologies. Her story Small Mercies was nominated for, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, a Pushcart Prize, and is included in Best Small Fictions 2019 and the BIFFY50 2019. Her novella-in-flash When It’s Not Called Making Love is published by Ad Hoc Fiction. She is Special Features Editor at New Flash Fiction Review. You can find her on Twitter @karjon.

Tom O'Brien is an Irishman living in London. His Novella-in-Flash Straw Gods is published by Reflex Press, and his Novelette-in-Flash, Homemade Weather, with Retreat West. His work has been Pushcart and Best Microfictions nominated, and he is the winner of the 2021 NFFD NZ Best Microfiction. His flash fiction and short stories can be found in print in various anthologies such as Blink-Ink and Bath Flash Fiction (forthcoming) as well as many sites around the web including Ellipsis Zine, Reflex, Spelk and 50-Word Stories. He’s on Instagram and twitter @tomwrote and has a class on Skillshare called Introducing the Novella-in-Flash. His website is www.tomobrien.co.uk.

Eleanor Walsh is a PhD graduate from the University of Plymouth. She lives in Cornwall where she works as an English tutor and creative editor. Her novellas 'Birds with Horse Hearts', set in Nepal, and 'Stormbred', set in Cornwall, are available from Ad Hoc Fiction. @EPutali

Next weekend, we're celebrating the tenth anniversary of National Flash Fiction Day...and what better way to celebrate it than with a workshop?

This year, we're joined by the brilliant Farhana Khalique and Anita Goveas who are generously offering an online workshop, 'Layers in Flash Fiction'.  Participation is free, but you must register for a place via the link below (first come first serve).  Here are the details:

Layers in Flash Fiction
Saturday, 26 June 2021, 1:30pm-2:30pm BST

In this one-hour workshop, Farhana Khalique and Anita Goveas will cover how you can use imagery, structures and titles to develop layers in your flash fiction.  Participants can look forward to a session packed with reading, writing exercises, and discussion.

To sign up for your free place, you'll need to register here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/national-flash-fiction-day-layers-in-flash-workshop-tickets-160188392795

You can read more about Farhana and Anita below.  And, if you can't make this workshop -- or if you want more -- fear not!  Farhana and Anita will be running more workshops in the autumn.  They will be independent of NFFD, so do follow them to find out more.

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/.

National Flash Fiction Day is celebrating its 10th Anniversary on Saturday, 26 June 2021, and to mark the occasion we’ve created a brand new Novella-in-Flash Award which is accepting submissions until 31 October 2021!

We are incredibly excited to have Sophie van Llewyn, author of Bottled Goods (long listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction) as our inaugural judge.  In this interview, Sophie talks about the novella-in-flash form, her experience writing Bottled Goods, and what she's looking for in a Novella-in-Flash Award submission....

Q: Can you share your definition of what makes a novella-in-flash and what the form brings to both writers and readers?

SvL: The novella-in-flash is such a fascinating form and it opens a universe of possibilities for both writer and reader. It’s a longer form of fiction that’s made up of multiple flash fictions revealing an overarching story arc.

So on the one hand, there’s the incredible punch in the gut packed by flash fiction. On the other hand, it’s easier for the reader to move from flash to flash, since the setting and characters often recur. I often find that when I read a collection, I need to take a break after a few flashes if each one moves between characters, themes, setting and tone. But a novella-in-flash can be read within a single session — there’s this compulsion to follow the book’s forward movement.

Q: We’d love to know why and how you decided to write Bottled Goods as a Novella-in-Flash.

SvL: Bottled Goods started with a character, a setting. A young woman being questioned by the border authorities of communist Romania. Something very precious, hidden in her purse. I tried to write the story as a flash fiction, but 1,000 words weren’t enough. As the days passed, the story grew in all possible directions. More characters emerged, started clashing. I could see the storyline shaping up.

So I tried to write a novel, then, but it didn’t work out. I was losing momentum, getting stuck after a few pages.

Discovering the form of the novella-in-flash was a revelation. I wrote a few flashes that encompassed a few incidents of my new storyline and then I wrote more flashes to fill in the blanks. I dedicated more flashes to the setting, to the magical elements. Once I’d struck the right form, the book really wrote itself.

Q: Do you have advice for our entrants of what to be careful about when writing NiFs?

SvL: Don’t overcrowd your novella-in-flash with characters. Too many episodic appearances can confuse the reader. So make sure that each character pulls their weight and if you do decide to write a flash from the POV of an episodic character, make sure you do it for all the right reasons.

A novella-in-flash can pack a lot of punch and a lot of plot in a word count much smaller than a novel, but it’s important that it doesn’t feel rushed. Too many loose threads, too many episodic characters can make it feel that way.

Q: Could you share some key features you’re looking for in entries with some examples from published NiFs, including your own

SvL: No matter what the theme, setting, tone, even the genre of the novella-in-flash, character growth and development are important aspects. A character who grows, who learns, who changes will power a story that’s satisfying for the reader. Three Sisters of Stone by Stephanie Carty and When It’s Not Called Making Love by Karen Jones are great go-to examples if you’d like to see how it’s done.

Use the white space. Readers of flash fiction are used to filling in the blanks, so don’t be afraid to take leaps in time, or to go back and forth in time (like in Charmaine Wilkerson’s How to Make a Window Snake).

Also, why not take risks? The novella-in-flash is such a fluid form, so why not define your own boundaries of story arc and what character development means?

FlashFlood, National Flash Fiction Day's curated journal, is open for submissions from 00:01 BST on 2 May to 23:59 BST on 8 May. 

Over the next week, we'll be reading hundreds of flashes and choosing a selection to publish in the next FlashFlood which will take place on National Flash-Fiction Day's 10th Anniversary on 26 June 2021.

We accept both unpublished and previously published work of up to 300 words (not including title). Full submission guidelines can be found here.

You can submit for free, via Duosuma, here:

https://duotrope.com/duosuma/submit/flashflood-journal-lej4G

You'll need to create an account through Duotrope/Duosuma to submit work, but you do not need to purchase a subscription to send your work to us; it is 100% free to submit.  If you need help, Duosuma's technical support can be found here.

Unpublished writers, scroll down the page; we have a special submission call just for you if you'd like to be considered for one of our reserved debut fiction slots!  Look for the Flash Fiction (Unpublished Writers) call listed halfway down this page and send us your work!

For 24 hours straight starting at 00:01 BST on 26 June, FlashFlood will be publishing one flash every 5 to 10 minutes or so.  Submissions will open for one week, from 00:01 BST on 2 May to 23:59 BST on 8 May 2021 for stories of up to 300 words.  You can read the submission guidelines over at FlashFlood.

This year, we welcome our team of seven editors reading for the 2021 Flood:

• Amy Barnes
• Tim Craig
• Anita Goveas
• Sara Hills
• Cassandra Parkin
• Santino Prinzi
• Judi Walsh

Each editor will be reading for one full day or two half days, with National Flash Fiction Day's Ingrid Jendrzejewski and Diane Simmons helping behind the scenes.

You can read more about the team here.

The results of the 2021 National Flash Fiction Day Microfiction Competition are in!

This year we awarded first, second and third prizes, together with seven highly commended flashes. All ten stories will receive prize money and will be published in the 2021 National Flash Fiction Day Anthology, which will be out in time for National Flash Fiction Day on 26 June 2021.  The winning and highly commended stories can be read here.

Thank you to our four judges. Their job this year was extremely difficult, requiring extra rounds of voting to reach our final ten.  This year's competition was judged by:

• Rachael Dunlop
• K M Elkes
• Sharon Telfer
• Alison Woodhouse

Huge congratulations to our winning and highly commended authors:

FIRST PRIZE

• 'Tea Time' by Susan James

SECOND PRIZE

• 'Last Supper' by Faye Brinsmead

THIRD PRIZE

• 'Amalgamation' by Johanna Robinson

HIGHLY COMMENDED (in alphabetical order)

• 'Adverb' by Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
• 'The Burning Boy' by Sam Payne
• 'A Cyclist' by Anne Howkins
• 'The Doll Hospital' by Rosie Garland
• 'Long Twilight' By Tracey Weller
• 'Sirens' By Caoimhín de Paor
• 'Summer Breeze' by Paul Dicken

Congratulations again to all our prize-winning and highly commended authors, and to all those who were shortlisted. And, a big thank you to everyone who entered this year’s competition and trusted us with their stories.

This year, we were thrilled to receive an amazing 726 micro fiction entries to the National Flash Fiction Day Micro Fiction Competition. This is 300 more than we received last year!

Our judges, Rachael Dunlop, K M Elkes, Sharon Telfer and Alison Woodhouse had the difficult job of whittling down the 726 stories to a shortlist of 26. This was no easy task and we’d like to take this opportunity to thank the judges for their hard work and for the speed and conscientiousness with which they carried out the judging.

It isn’t easy to tell a story in a 100 words, yet we were blown away by the variety of themes, subjects and styles we saw in the submissions. Thank you to everyone who sent in their work; we appreciated the chance to read your flash.

We are excited to announce that as a celebration of our 10^th anniversary, we will be awarding cash prizes to seven Highly Commended Micro Fictions in addition to those placed first, second and third.

Judging is still going on, so if you are lucky enough to be on the shortlist, feel free to celebrate on social media, but please don't mention the name of your story so that judging can remain anonymous.

Now, without further delay, our 26 shortlisted stories are: