About Flash

**This is less an exercise than it is an information dump.  We have weekly flash writing exercises on NaNoLJers and so it seemed appropriate to provide a bit of a blueprint for anyone unfamiliar with the form**

Every week we have “Wednesday’s Word of the Week”. The challenge is to take that word and use it as inspiration for a piece of flash fiction. For our purposes we will define flash fiction as being a complete story (as opposed to a vignette) in under 500 words. Due to the limited word count many story elements will likely have to remain unwritten and instead be hinted at — but it’s important that they exist.

Helpful links –>
Wikipedia entry for flash fiction
Writing Flash Fiction
Flash Fiction by Suneagle

The above links have some awesome advice, I won’t paraphrase it all here as that seems redundant. If you only read one of the links pick the second one — it’s the most comprehensive and easy to read.

Now that we’ve got a better understanding of flash and some great pointers on how to read it — allow me to introduce you to a few markets you might consider submitting to once you’ve got a story or two polished up and ready to go :)

SmokeLong Quarterly — accepts flash up to 1,000 words long
StoryBytes — accepts stories between 64 and 1024 words long, but all word counts must be a power of two
Vestal Review — accepts stories up to 500 words but has reading periods to check their guidelines before submitting
Long Story Short — accepts short stories up to 2,000 words and flash up to 1,000 words. This is a great market to break into — I say that because they’ve accepted one of my flash fiction pieces for publication. They don’t pay, but it’s a good way to start building up publishing credits.
Flashquake — accepts stories up to 1,000 words long. They have reading periods but are a great place to submit to as you can read the editors comments on your stories if they reject you — which can offer up invaluable information

This is FAR from a complete list, but if you’re looking to publish in the flash fiction market, it should give you some good ideas for where to start.

:)

Edited on January 12, 2007 to add the following markets. Some of these are ‘micro-markets’ in that they are basically just a blog where someone posts submissions, but it’s still a place to show off your work, and, some of them are rather quite a bit larger than that. I have no personal experience with any of them, just sharing the links :)

Flash Flooding
Flashes of Speculation
Whims Place (This seems to be a flash fiction contest site)
365 Tomorrows
55 Fiction
Flash Forward
Flash Me Magazine
Flash Shot
Micro Horror (Max word count of 666, of course ;) )
Short Stories East of the Web
The Write Gallery