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Some while ago we had a flash fiction contest and one or two people said they'd like to do it again. I held off because WOTF was exercising several people, it was summer vacations, and so forth.
Now seems like a good time to offer another.
Several people last time had difficulties with the 1000 word limit, so I propose to increase the limit to 2000 words (hence "Lite Fiction") -- still short enough, I hope, to get the benefits of flash, not too demanding to crit, yet giving a little more room for the story.
Triggers (which I hope will work for any genre) would be:
The tallest tower on the planet Merchant of rarities (rare goods or services) A flowing together (confluence)
Your story would be inspired by one or more of the triggers, 2000 words max. (Using all the triggers gains kudos but isn't mandatory.)
Timescales would be about four weeks to write the story, and another two to trade crits, vote and determine winners.
If there are ten or more takers, we'll run it. If you'd like to sign up, please post "I'm in" in this thread by Weds 10th, and we'll start the contest in Writing Challenges the following weekend.
If you want to follow the conventions of the people who coined the term "flash fiction", this is a "sudden fiction" contest. Robert Shapard and James Thomas, who edited the Flash Fiction anthologies, have other anthologies with stories of up to 2000 words, and that's the term they use.
posted
I'm going to change the title of this topic to match the one in the Writing Challenges. I hope that's okay.
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Hi billawaboy, and welcome to Sudden Fiction.
Open Office claims to be entirely compatible with MS Word and I've found no reason to doubt it, except that the reviewing and commenting feature doesn't look quite as neat as Word's. You might want to ask people to avoid using it when critiqueing your stories and instead just put comments in-line with the text, in CAPS or [brackets] or somehow--several people comment that way anyhow.
Please be sure to save your file as document type Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP .doc -- not the default .odt type.
It's not a reqiurement of the contest, but many people like to use "standard manuscript format" for their stories, because this means they can iron out the wrinkles with it and don't have to reformat prior to submission to a market. (Late reformatting can introduce errors which, if the formatting had been done earlier, might have been spotted by readers or the writer during reviews and revisions.) Here's Robert J. Sawyer's guide to manuscript formatting: http://www.sfwriter.com/mschklst.htm
To summarise it simply: one inch margins, Courier 12 pt font, double spaced lines, half inch indent for paragraphs--which are 'aligned left', not right-justified. Also, dumb quotes and em-dashes shown as two hyphens. (No, it ain't pretty, but this is largely what publishers say they like, certainly the majors like Asimov's, Analog and F&SF. That said, some people prefer to ignore (some of) these rules and some electronic publications don't care about them.)
Hope this helps, and looking forward to a contest full of fun and great reading, Pat
[This message has been edited by TaleSpinner (edited September 08, 2008).]
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She bites!
