I had a book come out last month. Maybe you heard me talk about it. I have another book coming out this month, called Days. I’m just a little proud of it. You know, just a touch.

And that’s going to be it for awhile. I’ve got some work to do on Broken Patterns before I send it out again, (So much for being done.) I’ve got a new project, but it’s still in rough draft form. And I haven’t written any short pieces, since I’ve been working on this new thing. Seriously, if I don’t get some written soon there will be no new short pieces from me next month, and I know how devastated all of you (just me) will be by that.

My harvest came in. I finished three books and got to do all the fun things that finishing books brings. I have started marketing, set up at least one book review, even sold a couple (one) copies (copy). Now it’s time to start sowing again.

Actually, I started sowing as soon as I was done. When I finished Broken Patterns, I started on the second draft of Starting Chains, Draft one having been written in between the third and fourth versions of Broken Patterns. When I finished Days, I started writing short stories for upcoming books. When I published Thirty Days, I started planning for this year’s Thirty Days event, and the book that will come after it.

Even starting right away, though, it’s going to be a long time before another book of mine is published. I have a lot of sowing to do before another season of harvest.

I should get back to it.

There was a time when I had no idea what flash fiction was. When I learned what it was, I hated the thought. What was the point, I thought, of trying to condense a story into 500 words or less? Wasn’t a short story bad enough? How could I ever fall in love with a character in just a few pages, let alone a few paragraphs?

Then I read some truly amazing flash fiction, and realized what an impact it can carry. Then I wrote a few, and found the poetry and power that flash fiction lends itself to so beautifully.

I believe that every writer should write flash fiction. The benefits are just too numerous to ignore.

• You can use flash fiction to explore worlds, situations, and voices you aren’t sure you want to devote pages and pages to.
• You learn brevity from writing flash fiction. There is just no room for long windedness.
• You learn to tighten your writing. Even when you’re not writing flash fiction. If you learn to see the fatty words in a sentence, you start seeing them in all of your sentences. Even insanely long fantasy series.

If you’ve never written flash fiction, though, please understand that it is entirely different than any other fiction you will ever write. It’s not a whole story, or a whole world. It’s not going to show character growth, or tell of an adventure where the hero saves the distressed person. There will be no love interest, no secondary plots. Don’t write flash fiction like it’s just a mini short story, in other words. Write it like this, instead.

Show a moment. It doesn’t need to be a defining moment, but it can be. It doesn’t need to be a first moment, or a last moment, but it can be.

The important thing about that moment, is that it have some sort of emotional impact. It should make the reader feel something. It doesn’t have to be something deep. Maybe the emotion is laughter. Maybe it’s just creepy. Tumbler has a whole section of one or two sentence scary stories. But maybe it is deep. Maybe it’s a box of gold jewelry at the guard’s station outside of a Jewish ghetto in Germany. Maybe it’s an A plus term paper set next to a bottle of caffeine pills and a razor. Maybe it’s a brand new soccer ball being given to a boy who doesn’t even own his own tooth brush.

Your moment should allude to a bigger story, though. Take any of those examples, and I bet you could write a whole novel. Lots of them, in fact. How many teenage dramas talk about the pressure to succeed in school, or cutting? Lots. And you could sink boats with the amount of fiction written about the Holocaust.

Now, we’ll stop here a moment, and talk about why we would bother, then. Why write flash if you can just write a novel about something emotional like that?

Because many of these large moments are too big for us to really fathom.

Let me share something with you as an example. I was fifteen on September 11th, 2001. I sat in school, and was told that our country had been attacked. First attack on the US from a foreign enemy since Pearl Harbor, and all that. It was emotional. It was sad. I didn’t really get that upset about it. It was a terrible thing, but it didn’t have any direct effect on my life. There were no faces attached to this for me.

Then Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, was kidnapped and murdered by Pakistani militants. This was too small for me to ignore. I lost my shit over this guy, who I had never even heard of before. It was because he was a journalist, and I wanted to be a journalist. It was because he was doing what I wanted to do, and he died for it. It was because it was a small enough tragedy for my mind to comprehend. It would have made a great flash fiction piece.

To put it another way, a novel is a train accident, a space shuttle going off to Venus, a mighty hero on a quest. Flash fiction is a blood stained baby shoe on the pavement, a man seeing Earth grass for what he knows is the last time (I’m going to write that), a cup of wine after the saddle bags are packed.

Homework: Write five flash fiction pieces this week, one for each week day. Don’t judge them for at least a week. Don’t complain, it’s only 500 words and you get Saturday off.

I think this is a magazine I’m going to be committing a lot of time to. Science Fiction and Fantasy is a good, old school fiction magazine. I’m not old school about a lot of things, but I do miss the bygone days of fiction magazines like Creepshow.

Genre- Honestly, if you can’t guess by the title, creative writing might not be the career for you.

Word count- non specific

Payout- 7 to 12 cents per word

Wait time- Eight weeks

Rights- Not list

Here is your link to full submission guidelines.

Want even more markets? Sign up for the Road To Full Time to get the ever growing list of short fiction markets.

That title seems redundant, in my opinion. In any case, it’s still a pretty awesome place to submit your science fiction short stories to. It pays well and has a really good reputation for producing some pretty awesome short fiction.

Genre- Science Fiction.

Word Count- Between 1,000 to 75,000

Payout- Eight cents a word

Sub Date- Anytime

Wait time- Usually about five weeks

Here is your link to the full submission guidelines.

Want even more markets? Sign up for The Road To Full Time, and get the ever growing list of markets in your in box, every month.

Re blogging for Throwback Thursday.

This story will appear in the upcoming collection, Days and Other Stories. To pre order, click here and use offer code dayspre to get half off the cover price.

The Letter on The Bar

    When I left high school, there wasn’t any money in the family budget for me to go to college.  I’m not going to say I didn’t resent that, just a little bit.  After all, was it my fault my little sister Lynn got sick, and that ate up all the savings mom had?  No, but I was sure the one who was going to have the rest of my life wreaked because of it.  So while my friends went off to big state colleges to start their lives full of success and great jobs, I got stuck working at a crappy diner, praying I might save up enough to get some sort of degree at the community college instead.
I always hated working nights at the diner.  I’d get the occasional family, some quiet people, but not many.  No, most of what I got on those long nights were college students from the campus.  Just a few years younger than me, a constant reminder of what I could have done if things had been different.  If Lynn hadn’t gotten sick.
They didn’t tip well, didn’t eat much.  They came in as loud, needy groups, or by themselves laden with books and papers.  I poured their coffee, cleaned up booths covered in ketchup and eraser smudges after they left, and hated each and every one of them, except one.
She came in one night, shaking the rain from her coat as she went.  She sat down at the bar, and ordered a coffee.  She had a bookbag with her, but she didn’t take out any work.

Instead she took out an open envelope, and pulled what looked like a letter from it.  She read it, then must have read it again.  Finally, she pulled out her phone, and started typing.  After a few minutes she put her phone away, finished her coffee, and paid her tab, leaving a quarter next to her cup.  She was gone before I realized she’d left the letter behind as well.

I knew that I should have just left it alone.  Nothing in that letter was any of my business.  But there weren’t any other customers, and my worse nature got the better of me.  I scooped it up, and started to read.

Maggie,
     I’m sorry that it took so long for me to write you, but I wanted to make sure that you could think about this for yourself, instead of letting Mom tell you what you should think about it. Now that you’re in college, I hope you’re away from that.
     Look, I know my leaving was hard on you, and I know that there can never be a good reason to have left you there alone.  You were the only regret I had.  The way that woman treated us, the fear she put us both through.  I know the only thing that made it any easier for me was having you around.  I wish I hadn’t had to leave you behind to deal with her yourself.
     But I had to do what I did.  Mom wouldn’t let me tell you about Becky.  She never wanted you to see her, never wanted you to be the same disappointment I was.  I know this is probably terrible of me, but I’m not sorry that she doesn’t want to see me still.  Becky is too precious for me to share with someone so hateful.  
    Maggie, I know you went through hell these last few years.  I’m sorry that I wasn’t there when Dad died.  But I just couldn’t have Becky around that.  She didn’t need to face that.
When I was going to Pitt, there was this little diner just off campus.  If you can, meet me there on Friday.  

Hoping to see you,
Candace.

Never had I been so happy to realize that I was working on Friday.

When the day came, I waited for the girl named Maggie to show up.  When she finally did, I watched her as carefully as I could without seeming like a stalker.  She kept looking toward the door.  Finally, a woman walked in, holding the hand of a three year old girl.

Maggie got up from her stool, and ran to the woman.  She knelt down to say something to the little girl, then give her a hug.  She was crying.

I watched them sit in a booth, and talk for hours.  Candace looked like she’d done alright for herself, all alone with a baby to look after on top of it.

When I got home that night, I started looking at grant and student loan information.  And I called Lynn, just to see how she was doing.

I am really excited about this month’s theme. But Nicole, you’re excited about every month’s theme. That’s true, but this week is especially great, because I get to talk about short fiction.

That’s right, short fiction, what I consider one of the most important things in the writing community. You should be writing short fiction at every stage of your career.

When you’re first starting out, you write short fiction for a lot of reasons. You do it to practice, because nothing is better practice than writing a whole lot of short stories. You do it to start getting publishing credits, because it’s easier to sell your short fiction without an agent than it is a novel. You do it to build up momentum, because writing a fifteen page piece is a lot less daunting than a whole damn novel. You do it because it’s fun.

When your career is starting, and you’re working on novels, you do it because it’s a palate cleanser after writing a longer piece. You do it to keep building your name, because one or two novels is not going to make you much of a fan base. You do it because you’re going to have days when you are sick to death of your main character. You do it because maybe you’ve always written Historical Fantasy, and now you want to try Science Fiction. You do it because you want to experiment with a new pov. You do it to be experimental. You do it if there’s a character that you like, but you don’t really know if you want to devote a whole book to. You do it because it’s still fun. You do it because it’s still something new.

If a novel is a landscape of a mountain, a short story is a snapshot in a coffee shop.

All month long, we’ll be taking an in depth look at what a short story is, and how you can use it to make you a better, and better known, writer.

What do you think about short fiction? Let us know, in the comments below

February