Side by Side

I just had a new short story, Side by Side, published in the Every Day Fiction web magazine. They publish a new flash fiction story every day. Flash fiction refers to extremely short short stories. A common definition is 1,000 words (which is what Every Day Fiction uses), but you also see places that specify 500 words, 300 words or even, in the most extreme case, 6 words.

I wrote Side by Side and submitted it quite a long time ago–long enough that I assumed that they had rejected it silently (which happens more often than it should). However, I got a nice letter from them a few weeks ago, asking for some tweaks. The story is a little bit mean, and hopefully amusing. It breaks many of the rules of flash fiction, but fortunately I didn’t learn those rules until after I’d written it.

I’ve written a few flash stories, but it is tricky. I very recently set out to write a flash story for a particular market, but ran over the word limit by about two thousand words.