There has never been a big push in me to write short stories. I didn’t think I had the discipline for it. Nor did I think I’d be any good at getting the twist in at the end to make it a satisfying read – I need to work on that self confidence thing.

Anyway… now that I’m having a break from Silk Over Razor Blades and Clash Of The Animal Kings, I figure it was about time I started to try some of it. So I started looking around to get an idea of what makes a short story, what makes flash fiction and what makes micro fiction.

In terms of word counts, this is what I found:

Flash Fiction
1,000 words

Short Story
1,000 – 7,500 words

Novelette
15,000 – 40,000

Novel
40,000+

Which made me feel pretty good inside. Most things I’ve written to date have definitely hit and exceeded the 40k mark. There was the yaoi ‘short’ that I wrote for a friend’s birthday which hit 50k. But I’ve not experimented with anything less than that.

So… if you’ve been keeping an eye on my Twitter you will have noticed that I’ve been using the 750 words challenge to write flash fiction. I’ve not done anything with any of it yet, so far I have about five (I’ve been doing them every day which is quite a lot of fun actually. Getting them in before I go to work.). I’m using that A-Z of words I wrote a while ago while sitting in Nero’s to give me a prompt or trigger for each piece (thanks for the idea Maria!).

Its an exercise I’m really enjoying and, I must admit, its doing what NaNoWriMo did for me last year; which is reminding me that I love to write. Bonus! When I have a few more and they’ve had a bit of work done on them (they’re all raw first drafts at the moment; I’ve not even looked at them to edit them in any way) I’ll post them here as special treats every now and then. I’ll call them the A-Z Challenge or something like that.

I’m also hoping that some of them may be suitable to use for competitions or submissions to magazines. Got to be careful though; so far one of them has what can only be called a quirky BDSM vibe, and the other is pure rage rolling off the page in waves you can all but feel (the prompt word for that one was ‘anger’ so I’m not too disturbed by that). Hopefully as I continue through the list they’ll get a bit tamer and more magazine/competition friendly. Lol.

We’ll see. Who knows where my brain will take me now that its free to do whatever it fancies in 750 words or more? Bwahahaha aahaha hah ah ahaaaa!