Flash Fiction contest
Escape Pod is having a flash fiction contest right now - 500 word SF stories. I entered two, the first time I've ever submitted a story for possible publication*. I think they're both pretty good, but there are 156 stories in the contest, many from pro authors, so I doubt mine will come in the top 3. Still, I'm pretty keyed up about it, both for how well they do and the resulting feedback. I've always had some ambition to be a writer, but man were my skills rusty. A 500 word challenge was just the sort of thing to help me refine them a bit.
The stories are being publicly voted on, you see, by anyone at the Escape Artists forum. You need to sign up for an account before you can see the stories, so that they remain "unpublished". I'm not going to post them here until after the contest at least. But if you want to, you can sign up on the forums and read them there. Of course, they're all anonymous, so you probably won't recognize which two are mine. But who knows, you might end up voting for them anyway.
The stories are being put out in small groups, with the top vote getters advancing on to the next round. Groups are put up every other day, and I always look nervously to see if one of mine is in each new group. The contest will last over a month, though most stories won't last nearly so long. But who knows, maybe maybe they'll get published on the podcast. Or at least I'll get some good feedback on my writing.
*Yes, I've been published in Analog magazine for the Coalition to Ban DHMO page, but that was neither fiction nor was it submitted - they came to me and asked if they could publish it.
The stories are being publicly voted on, you see, by anyone at the Escape Artists forum. You need to sign up for an account before you can see the stories, so that they remain "unpublished". I'm not going to post them here until after the contest at least. But if you want to, you can sign up on the forums and read them there. Of course, they're all anonymous, so you probably won't recognize which two are mine. But who knows, you might end up voting for them anyway.
The stories are being put out in small groups, with the top vote getters advancing on to the next round. Groups are put up every other day, and I always look nervously to see if one of mine is in each new group. The contest will last over a month, though most stories won't last nearly so long. But who knows, maybe maybe they'll get published on the podcast. Or at least I'll get some good feedback on my writing.
*Yes, I've been published in Analog magazine for the Coalition to Ban DHMO page, but that was neither fiction nor was it submitted - they came to me and asked if they could publish it.