I Did A Thing – The flash fiction edition

Have you ever done something on a total whim and surprised yourself? One of my writing groups does a flash fiction contest every month and the top four stories are featured in their online magazine. In May, I went to one of the meetings where a perfect storm of things came together.

• It was the last day before the deadline
• The theme resonated with me and immediately a story idea popped into my head
• The President of the group said “It’s only 1000 words, just sit down and write it – what do you have to lose?”

It was like he was speaking directly to me, although he was in fact talking in generalities to the entire group that day. Call it procrastination because I truly needed to be working on a paper for my class, but it felt so good to just let myself write something.

It was the submitting it to the publication that was the whim. Like fiction writing so often is for me, just the act of writing something cleansed a little piece of my soul that has been suffering amid all this pandemic and social unrest of the last few months.

Imagine my surprise when a few days later I learned that mine was one of the stories they had picked to feature the next month in the online magazine, Salt Flats. Here’s a link if you want to check it out on Medium: https://medium.com/salt-city-genre-writers/escape-5c97baae7bda