Friday 17 May 2013

Flash Fiction: College Fund

"Evie, virginity is precious. It's not something to be given away freely — you can't get it back."

Evie's mother offered today's breakfast homily with burnt toast. There seemed no end to the advice sandwiched into the summer between school and university — morality, money, contraception, cooking, computers.

Her mother struggled as much with their bills as she did with their rattling PC. But sometimes she was right. Evie did need a good laptop. The preloved netbook was powerful enough to run the web-design software she planned to use. Her spreadsheet held promising quarterly forecasts for each coming year. She had no wish to be a pauper to her education, a slave to her loans.

Her virginity? Why hold onto something she didn't want? And if she was going to get rid of it, why not profit from it? As her mother said, it was not something to be given away freely.


"College Fund" was first published with The Pygmy Giant. More background here.

Wednesday 8 May 2013

Flash Summary

April came and went, as it is wont to do, complete with showers, but mostly chilled temperatures. May has arrived with the unexpected addition of sunshine. Picking up where I left off, I've had a tabloid paparazzi — collective noun for a number of flash fictions? — of flash fiction published in the last few weeks:


In other flash-related news, the NFFD's micro-fiction competition results were announced, with the winning and commended entries readable online. The judging was tough — nearly 450 entries that had, ultimately, to be turned into an ordered list of 10 — but enjoyable.

In personal competition-related news, I had a story longlisted for the Fish Flash Fiction Prize and another picked as a runner-up in the Salt Flash Fiction Prize. My entry, "A Higher Calling", will be included in The Salt Anthology of New Writing 2013 due out in a few months.


The Word of Mouth event last month was great fun and well attended. Two readers chose to read flash — Tania Hershman and me — and two chose longer short stories — Holly Corfield Carr and Nick Rawlinson. The pieces I read included "A Higher Calling", "So You Think You Can Cook?", "Authenticity", "Wrecked", "To Catch a Falling Leaf" and "S3xD0ll".