Recently, I was invited to enter a flash fiction contest hosted by Queer Sci Fi with the theme of migration. The story I submitted was three hundred words long, the maximum, and inspired by Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” which I read in high school and left a mark on me. The four-page short story, if you haven’t read it, was an exercise in inference and implication.
I appreciated the challenge of writing my story. How much could the reader infer from a few hundred words? How much could I imply? What emotions and thoughts could I stir up?
In having limitations, I enjoyed the process of crafting more than I had in months. Maybe it’s the short-short form (I’m impatient)? Maybe it hearkens back to my background in poetry?
Whatever it was, I feel jazzed about writing again, and I’m moving forward with a queer (of course) werewolf story that I’ve been asked to submit for another anthology. I haven’t given up on my novel about witches, but I do need a break from that major rewrite, and I think some lycanthropy is just what the doctor ordered.
Judging for the contest finishes in early April. The competition will be stiff, so if my work doesn’t make it to the collection, I’ll share it here in my blog.
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