Tag: flash fiction

The Shortlist 2013

~ simonsylvester ~ Leave a comment

Check it out! I’ve made the shortlist for the Flashtag Writing Competition, and I’m very pleased about it.

David Hartley's avatar#FLASHTAG

Well hello. We’ve bished, we’ve boshed, we’ve bashed. We’ve taken the stories you sent us and picked apart every single individual letter to find our favourites and, inevitably, all five of us rocked up with different favourites. Seriously. Happens every year. So we bish, bash, boshed it all out and agreed on our tip-top eight. And here, ladyfowls and gentlecocks, are those 8 arranged alphabetically by story title:

Let the Librarian Hold the Book by Allie Rogers

Looking for an Astrolabe by Michael Conley

Nothing Left Behind by Dale Lately

Occasional by Clare Kirwan

Pins and Needles by Guy Garrud

The Clockman by Cathy Lennon

The Girl Who Lived on a Bus Stop by Sarah Butler

This Kitten I Knew by Simon Sylvester

Congratulations Allie, Michael, Dale, Clare, Guy, Cathy, Sarah & Simon! BUT – who has won? You don’t find out, not yet. We will announce the magnificent winner…

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J. Robert Lennon: the ass-in-the-chair canard

~ simonsylvester ~ 2 Comments

Ever since I read his astonishing collection of flash fiction, ‘Pieces for the Left Hand‘, J. Robert Lennon has been my favourite not-dead writer. I say ‘not-dead’ because it saves me having to choose between him and Roberto Bolano, who is dead.

J. Robert Lennon has just written a great debunk of the classic advice on how to write: that you simply sit down and write. He punctures this myth with all the contempt it deserves, and states the truth with his customary humanity: that all writers are different, and that writing is a different experience for everyone, and that merely slogging away at your work is no guarantee of its quality:

“…ass-chair-contact hours engaged in this mess do not necessarily result in anything good. This varies from one writer to the next, and, for any given writer, from one hour to the next. You can spend six months on twenty shitty pages and six hours on twenty brilliant ones. None of it makes any sense.”