I came to writ­ing quite recent­ly. I quit a bad job a lit­tle over a year ago, start­ed writ­ing more than I ever had, began sub­mit­ting, had some accep­tances, a lot of rejec­tions and met a lot of peo­ple. I dis­cov­ered the medi­um of flash fic­tion through inves­ti­gat­ing var­i­ous means of pub­lish­ing and have been […]

Each Sun­day in the Zoetrope Vir­tu­al Studio’s Flash Fac­to­ry office, you’ll find a num­ber of its 200+ mem­bers respond­ing to either Frank Sullivan’s or Richard Osgood’s “Five-To-Fifty” chal­lenge: “From these five [prompt] words cre­ate a fifty or fifty-five word mas­ter­piece.” This past Sun­day morn­ing (July 19) at 9:53 Frank post­ed his five-words cho­sen at ran­dom from the […]

Flash has been around, well, since a cave­man or cave­woman found that only a tiny cor­ner of cave wall remained for his or her sto­ry. Maybe our first flash writer real­ized just stick­ing it all in that tiny space wouldn’t work; it would just cre­ate a big mess. Instead of invent­ing the wheel or solv­ing […]

First, con­sid­er the fol­low­ing poem by Anne Sex­ton. The Moss of His Skin Young girls in old Ara­bia were often buried alive next to their dead fathers, appar­ent­ly as sac­ri­fice to the god­dess­es of the tribes… –Harold Fel­der­man, “Chil­dren of the Desert,+ Psy­cho­analy­sis and Psy­cho­an­a­lyt­ic Review, Fall 1958. It was only impor­tant to smile and […]

If any ambi­tious man have a fan­cy to rev­o­lu­tion­ize, at one effort, the uni­ver­sal world of human thought, human opin­ion, and human sen­ti­ment, the oppor­tu­ni­ty is his own–the road to immor­tal renown lies straight, open, and unen­cum­bered before him. All that he has to do is to write and pub­lish a very lit­tle book. Its […]