In the last month I've had two light-hearted pieces published online at Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure.
The first, "Something to Eat", is a 100-worder, a drabble. I wrote it earlier this year for a competition. I was not sure it would find a useful home anywhere else, until Dr. Hurley's happened to have a call specifically for micro-fiction within 100 words.
The second, "Two Weeks in Spain", is somewhat longer at just under 1300 words. I wrote the story last year and it went through a few minor revisions over the year that improved it but did little to alter its basic form. I decided recently to revisit it and overhaul it, restructuring the opening and shearing a couple of hundred words off it. The result was much improved and is the version you can read now.
Debate rages as to what word length distinguishes a piece of flash fiction from a more conventional short story, but the cut-off is generally considered to be in the hundreds — and certainly no more than a thousand. So, I guess this almost makes "Two Weeks in Spain" my first published short story! Almost. "Remembrance of Things Past" is over a thousand words, but is available in spoken form rather than text. I also had a piece, "Patterns at Work", published on IASA's site a few years ago when they created a library of articles on software architecture skills. I decided to tackle my topic, design patterns, with fiction, which makes it more interesting from a technical perspective, but obviously makes it slightly contrived from the perspective of story writing. In contradiction to what I said about "Afterglow" here, "Patterns at Work" was actually the first time I was paid for fiction.
In the coming weeks I will repost both pieces on this blog.
The first, "Something to Eat", is a 100-worder, a drabble. I wrote it earlier this year for a competition. I was not sure it would find a useful home anywhere else, until Dr. Hurley's happened to have a call specifically for micro-fiction within 100 words.
The second, "Two Weeks in Spain", is somewhat longer at just under 1300 words. I wrote the story last year and it went through a few minor revisions over the year that improved it but did little to alter its basic form. I decided recently to revisit it and overhaul it, restructuring the opening and shearing a couple of hundred words off it. The result was much improved and is the version you can read now.
Debate rages as to what word length distinguishes a piece of flash fiction from a more conventional short story, but the cut-off is generally considered to be in the hundreds — and certainly no more than a thousand. So, I guess this almost makes "Two Weeks in Spain" my first published short story! Almost. "Remembrance of Things Past" is over a thousand words, but is available in spoken form rather than text. I also had a piece, "Patterns at Work", published on IASA's site a few years ago when they created a library of articles on software architecture skills. I decided to tackle my topic, design patterns, with fiction, which makes it more interesting from a technical perspective, but obviously makes it slightly contrived from the perspective of story writing. In contradiction to what I said about "Afterglow" here, "Patterns at Work" was actually the first time I was paid for fiction.
In the coming weeks I will repost both pieces on this blog.
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