News

It's nearly that time of year again...time to submit to the National Flash Fiction Day Anthology and our annual Microfiction Competition!

We are delighted to welcome Damhnait Monaghan to the National Flash Fiction Day team as this year's guest editor for the 2023 National Flash Fiction Day anthology.  She'll be joining NFFD's Anthology Editor Karen Jones in putting together this year's anthology of flash fiction from around the world.  You can read more about this year's editors here.

The theme for this year’s anthology is TIME. Do you see it stretching before you, or reaching back? Is there never enough, or does it drag? Does it make you rush, slow you down, make you wish for more? Where will time take you? We can’t wait to find out.

Feel free to interpret the theme however you wish, in 500 words or fewer. Selected flashes will be published in National Flash Fiction Day's 12th Annual Anthology. Payment is one contributor's copy of the anthology.

Entries will also be open for the Microfiction Competition, but there is no theme.  Competition winners and runners up will be published in the anthology as well as the time-themed flash.

Both projects will be open for submissions from the 1st of December 2022 to the 15th of February 2023.

 

With our submission window set to open shortly we'd like to take a moment to introduce you to this year's judging panel.  This year, we're excited to announce that Tim Craig, Amanda Huggins, Fiona J. Mackintosh and Johanna Robinson will be reading your submissions.  These fantastic flash writers, readers and editors will be doing it all: reading the submissions that come in, compiling a shortlist, and then deciding on the winning and highly commended pieces.

Our submission window opens on Thursday 1 December 2022 and closes on Wednesday 15 February 2023.  We will be announcing results on or before 15 March 2023.  We'll be reading flash of up to 100 words on any theme, but we are not able to consider simultaneous submissions this year.

For the 2023 competition, we're thrilled that all our highly commended runners-up as well as our first, second and third place winners will receive cash prizes. All winning and commended pieces will be published online as well as in the 2023 National Flash Fiction Day print anthology. Check back on 1 December for full details and submission guidelines.

In the new year, we'll be posting interviews with our judges so you can get a better sense of what they're looking for, but in the meantime, you can read more about each of them below.

Huge thanks to our judges for taking on the 2023 NFFD Microfiction Competition and we look forward to reading your work!

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2023 Microfiction Competition Judges

Originally from Manchester, Tim Craig lives in London. A previous winner of the Bridport Prize for Flash Fiction, his short-short fiction has placed or been commended four times in the Bath Flash Fiction Award and has also appeared in the Best Microfiction 2019 and 2022 anthologies. His debut collection Now You See Him was published in 2022 by AdHoc Fiction.

Amanda Huggins is the author of All Our Squandered Beauty and Crossing the Lines – both of which won a Saboteur Award for Best Novella – as well as five collections of short stories and poetry. Amanda's fiction and travel writing have appeared in publications such as Mslexia, Popshot, Tokyo Weekender, The Telegraph, Traveller, Wanderlust and the Guardian. Three of her flash fiction stories have also been broadcast on BBC radio. She has won numerous awards, including the Colm Toibin International Short Story Award, the H E Bates Short Story Prize and the British Guild of Travel Writers New Travel Writer of the Year. She was a runner-up in the Costa Short Story Award and the Fish Short Story Prize, and has been shortlisted for the Bridport Flash Prize, The Alpine Fellowship Award and many others. Amanda lives in Yorkshire and works as an editor and publishing assistant.

Fiona J. Mackintosh (www.fionajmackintosh.com) is the Scottish-American author of a flash collection, The Yet Unknowing World published in the UK by Ad Hoc Fiction. She has won the Fish, Bath, Reflex, Flash 500, and NFFD Micro competitions, and her short stories have been listed in several competitions in the UK and Ireland. She lives just outside Washington D.C., and her historical novel Ancestral Virgins is currently on submission to agents.

Johanna Robinson is based near Liverpool, UK, and has been writing short fiction since 2016. 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. She is currently working on a novel set in Victorian Liverpool, and has been funded by Arts Council England. More of her work can be found at www.johanna-robinson.com.

National Flash Fiction Day might be over, but the flashy fun continues through the weekend....

Over at The Write-In, we've started publishing our first responses to 2022's writing prompts.  Remember, you have until 23:59 on Sunday, 19 June 2022 to send us a response to our writing prompts for a chance of publication at The Write-In...and we've made it easy for you by collecting all of this year's prompts in one place.  Go on...send us some of your words!

Over at FlashFlood, you can join us from 8:00 a.m. BST  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.

And, of course, there are other great organisations holding flash fiction events this weekend and beyond.  Do check them out!

• New Zealand's National Flash Fiction Day is celebrating their ten year anniversary on Sunday, 19 June 2022.  They have a brilliant line-up of Flash Fiction Fun and you can find the full schedule at their website, https://nationalflash.org/.
• Writers' HQ is offering a Five Days of Flash Challenge which will have you drafting five new stories in five days -- all for free!  You can find Writers' HQ at https://writershq.co.uk and information about the Five Days of Flash here.
• The Flash Fiction Festival is back this year, with an event next month, 8-10 July 2022.  We'll be holding a reading of anthology at the festival, alongside their many fantastic talks, workshops and readings.  Find out more at https://www.flashfictionfestival.com/.

We hope you had a lovely National Flash Fiction Day and a great rest of the weekend.  Take care and happy writing from Ingrid, Diane and all of us at the UK's National Flash Fiction Day.

Our team is loving all the responses to our series of writing prompts over at The Write-In.  We've been reading all day long and we're getting ready to start publishing our favourites starting at midnight and carrying on until we've read everything you've sent us!

We're publishing 25 prompts -- one every hour from 00:00 18 June to 00:00 19 June.  You're welcome to send us responses to any and all of them.

Remember, you have until 23:59 on Sunday, 19 June 2022 to send us a response to our writing prompts for a chance of publication at The Write-In.

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.

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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…

 

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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!

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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/.