BlueHouse is putting together our first issue, and we are still looking for work by emerging and established writers that frame the “I voice” in a new and exciting way! We love poetry, concrete poetry, lyric essay, creative non-fiction, flash and micro fiction and so much more!
Any questions? Please contact us.
Interested in submitting? Check out our submission guidelines.
For the latest from BlueHouse, please visit our website, or follow us on twitter.
Happy writing!
-The Editors
National Flash Fiction Day this year will be on Saturday 15th June Submissions for the 2019 National Flash Fiction Day anthology and micro fiction competition are NOW OPEN!
Anthology
This year’s theme is filled with possibility…or not! Our theme can reveal secrets to us and it can keep danger hidden. Is it trying to keep everyone from getting in, or is it trying to keep you from getting out? Knock, knock, who’s there? It’s our theme: Doors!
We want you to open the door to stories wild with imagination. We’re looking for those creepy mysteries about doors we can’t find the key to. We want those funny tales of frustration when doors do exactly what they’re supposed to when we don’t want them to. Maybe the stories you want to share are about metaphorical doors, filled with the disappointment of doors that are closed to us or brimming with excitement at new opportunities. Whichever door you decide to write about, make sure it’s your best and that is fewer than 500 words!
This year’s editors are Joanna Campbell and Santino Prinzi.
Please submit up to three (3) unpublished flashes of 500 words or fewer before our deadline. Titles are not included in the word count.
The submission fee for this year’s anthology is: £2.50 for one (1) entry, £4.00 for two (2) entries, and £6.00 for three (3) entries.
The deadline is Friday 15th March 2019, 23:59pm GMT.
Please visit our website for the full submission guidelines.
Micro Fiction Competition
Entries are open for this year’s National Flash Fiction Day Micro Fiction competition! This year’s judges are Angela Readman, Diane Simmons, Kevlin Henney, and Judy Darley.
First prize is £75.
Second prize is £50.
Third prize is £25.
The winning and shortlisted authors will be published in the National Flash Fiction Day 2019 anthology. Winning and shortlisted authors will also receive a free print copy of this anthology.
Please submit up to three (3) unpublished micro fictions of 100 words or fewer before our deadline. Titles are not included in the word count and there is no themefor the micro fiction competition.
The entry fee for this year’s micro fiction competition is: £2.00 for one (1) entry, £3.50 for two (2) entries, £5.00 for three (3) entries.
The deadline is Friday 15th March 2019, 23:59pm GMT.
Please visit our website for the full submission guidelines.
Support
In previous years we have had funding and have been able to offer free entry to everyone. Other years, like this year, we do not have funding and have needed to charge a small fee in order to cover our costs so we can continue doing what we do.
We would like offer free entry to disadvantaged and marginalised writers but we do not have the funding we need to be able to do this. We are working to try and secure funding.
If you would like to help us achieve this by donating entries for the anthology or micro competition, please email us: nationalflashfictionday@gmail.com.
Now in it’s seventh year, National Flash Fiction Day will be on Saturday 16th June 2018 and we’ll be celebrating with events and readings and submission opportunities! We’re currently open for our micro-fiction competition and our annual anthology, so get writing!
Micro Competition
From now until Saturday 17th March 2018, you can send us up to three micro fictions on any theme for our Micro fiction competition. These must be 100 words or fewer, and can be on any theme.
More details about the micro completion can be found here: http://nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/comp.html
Anthology
This year’s anthology theme is one you’ll be able to sink your teeth into, and we’re hungry for your flashes! From now until Saturday 31st March 2018, you can send us up to three 500 word flashes on this year’s theme: Food! The anthology will be edited by award-winning writer, Alison Powell, and National Flash Fiction Day Co-Director, Santino Prinzi. Your stories must be 500 words or fewer.
We’re looking for stories inspired by and about whatever’s on your plate. We’re ready to salivate over your sentences, to savour the subtle flavours of your subtext, to devour your delicious dialogue. Sweet, sour, savoury, sharp, tangy, rich, or rotten. Serve us up some scrumptious tales and tantalising treats with tasty twists. Are we all becoming too healthy? Or is suet the main dish of the day? Has a friendship been ruined by raw chocolate? We’re looking for full-fat, jam-packed flash fiction with an aftertaste we won’t forget. Feel free to interpret the theme of “food” however you wish, but your flashes must fit the theme in some way.
More details about the anthology submissions can be found here: http://nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/anth.html
We can’t wait to feast upon your words!
National Flash Fiction Day UK is on Saturday 24th June 2017, and we are open for submissions for our Micro Fiction Competition and our Annual Anthology! Entry for both are free!
Competition: There is no theme for our competition, so feel free to send us up to three of your stories that are 100 words or fewer! Deadline for entries for our Micro Fiction Competition is Friday 31st March 2017. You can find out more information here: http://nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/comp.html
Anthology: Once again we are delighted to open ourselves up to submissions for the annual NFFD anthology. This year the theme is Life As You Know It.
This year’s editors will be the Co-Director of National Flash-Fiction Day, Santino Prinzi, and renowned flash-fiction writer, Meg Pokrass.
We want stories inspired by the lens of your own experiences, stories that navigate life and the world as only your characters know how. Tales of hope, loss, fear, and resilience. Flashes about identity, vulnerability, and triumph. We want you to harness and make use of your own experiences in fiction: What are your secrets? What makes you cry? What keeps you awake? Feel free to interpret “life as you know it” however you like, but your flashes must fit the theme in some way.
However you care to work with our theme, we want to read your stories. The word limit is 500 words, and you can submit up to 3 stories. Please include them in the email as MS Word attachments, and follow all the guidelines below.
All writers who have a story selected for the anthology will receive a free print copy of the book upon publication. Deadline for entries for our Anthology is Friday 14th April 2017.
You can find out more information here: http://nationalflashfictionday.co.uk/anth.html
This year we will be launching the anthology the U.K.’s first ever Flash Fiction Literary Festival, which will be taking place in Bath.
THE CITY: ISOLATION/ TOGETHERNESS
Online fiction journal Flight Journal is now calling for short story writers to submit their micro fiction. The chosen writers will:
For this issue, Flight Journal is looking for micro fiction of up to 500 words. The theme for this issue is The City: Isolation and/or Togetherness. We would like to read a range of voices and tones, particularly those which can move or amuse (or both!). Everything else is left completely open for you as a writer to interpret.
In some instances we may choose works that we would like to develop with the author through one-to-one conversations and edits. Please bear this in mind when submitting your stories.
Rules:
To enter please submit your story via Submittable by clicking here.
The deadline is: 31 October, 11.59pm (as in the last minute of 31 October)
Try a FREE week of the course here!
Running for 6 weeks from 10th October, this online course is structured to work around busy lives and work schedules, and to support writers of all experiences. With the help of inspiring exercises, writing prompts, advice from award-winning short fiction writers, fantastic published examples, thought-provoking literary analysis, and a great little online community, you’ll come out the other side with plenty of ideas and at least one fully formed short story to call your very own.
Writers’ HQ is an arse-kicking, procrastination-busting writing organisation based in Sussex (with plans for global online domination). Their motto? Stop f**king about and start writing. With online courses, local writing retreats and workshops, Writers’ HQ is here to help writers get the words out of their heads and onto the page with as little angst as possible.
Write a story in less than 100 words, incorporating the prompt given, to be in with a chance of winning £20.
Entry fee is only 99 pence.
Competition runs weekly closing at 6pm BST each week.
We’re almost ready to put together Issue #3 of The A3 Review. There’s still time to qualify, if you enter this month’s writing contest on the theme of HANDS.
Then it’s on to Issue #4! We’ve launched the six writing contests whose winners will make up the contributors of Issue #4. You can see the six new themes if you click here.
If you’re new to The A3 Review, you can read more about the fold-out lit mag here. Basically, it’s a lit mag that behaves like a map. All contributions are under 151 words. There’s a small entry fee, and the ultimate three winners receive cash prizes; all winners are published in the magazine and receive Writing Maps.
The themes for the upcoming Writing Contests are:
Read the full details here. And sign up to The A3 Review‘s newsletter here.
The two winning entries from each month will appear in Issue #4 of The A3 Review and will constitute the shortlist. The three overall winners from the shortlist will receive prizes as follows: 1st = £150; 2nd = £75; 3rd = £50. All winning entries will receive contributor copies, Writing Maps and other goodies.
It’s all happening! Spring has got us sprung. We’re launching 6 new Writing Maps Writing Contests all at once AND we’re launching Issue #2 of The A3 Review.
You can read more about The A3 Review here. It’s a lit mag that behaves like a map. All contributions are under 151 words and up until now have been written in less than a week. But things are changing – we’re giving you more time to write, more time to tweak, more time to procrastinate. The next six Writing Maps Writing Contests are being launched in one go. There’s a small entry fee, and bigger cash prizes.
The themes for the upcoming Writing Contests are:
Read the full details here.
The two winning entries from each month will appear in Issue #3 of The A3 Review and will constitute the shortlist. The three overall winners from the shortlist will receive prizes as follows: 1st = £150; 2nd = £75; 3rd = £50. All winning entries will receive contributor copies, Writing Maps and other goodies.
Issue 7.2 of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available.
It features new stories from Australia, Austria, Britain, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, and the USA. We are particularly pleased to open with pieces by two distinguished European writers, in luminous translations: two ‘zkv’s (‘zeer korte verhalen’ [very short stories]) by A. L. Snijders, who coined the term, translated from the Dutch by Man Booker International winner Lydia Davis; and three pieces from Austrian writer Josef Winkler’s When the Time Comes (2013), translated by Adrian West, originally published in German as Wenn es soweit ist – Erzählung (1998). Wonderful renderings by West of Winkler also appeared in Flash, 6.1. Davis’s impressive Collected Stories (2009) was featured in the ‘Flash Presents’ section of 6.2; her latest collection, Can’t and Won’t, is enthusiastically reviewed in this issue by Robert Shapard, editor of influential flash and sudden-fiction anthologies.
This issue’s ‘Flash Presents’ contains four stories by Virginia Woolf: ‘A Haunted House’, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, ‘Blue & Green’, and ‘In the Orchard’. These are followed by our fourth ‘Flash Essay’. In ‘“Splinters & mosaics”: Virginia Woolf’s Flash Fictions’, Kathryn Simpson argues that Woolf’s experimental flashes provide insight into her emergence as a major modernist novelist and her enduring preoccupations.
‘Flash Reviews’ examines two other single-author books and two anthologies. Laurie Champion is entertained by Lucy Corin’s One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, a collection of short and short-short stories, while Christine Simon is intrigued by Will Eaves’s The Absent Therapist, a novel in flashes. Robert Scotellaro enjoys Tara Laskowski’s selection from ten years of the SmokeLong Quarterly, while Ian Seed embraces the longer perspective of Alan Ziegler’s Short, which ranges over five centuries of brief prose. Each review is accompanied by a sample story. Laskowski’s anthology is represented by Jeff Landon’s ‘Five Fat Men in a Hot Tub’, Ziegler’s by Oscar Wilde’s ‘The Artist’.
To order a copy of the issue, or to subscribe to the magazine, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine
Peter Blair and Ashley Chantler (Editors)
Last year Neon Books published the first ever edition of Battery Pack – a tiny anthology of tiny stories, which was distributed free along with the spring issue of Neon Literary Magazine. The finished article featured stories that ranged from horror to tragedy to comedy to just plain weird, and enjoyed a print run of over three-hundred copies. This year I want to do it all over again.
To that end, Battery Pack II is now open to submissions. Stories need to be short, of course, but I’m also looking for original and high-quality writing. Take a look at the first volume for some reference, and then send along your miniature masterpieces via the webform on the guidelines page.
While you’re there, don’t forget to have a look at the most recent issue of Neon. If you subscribe now you’ll receive a free copy of Tracey S Rosenberg’s chapbook The Naming Of Cancer with your first issue. That’s in addition to the free pamphlet Selected Timelines: Past & Future. And all that for only £10 plus postage!
Micro-fiction trailblazer David Gaffney is running another of his ever-popular masterclasses in the form, at Creative Industries Trafford at the Waterside Arts Centre in Sale, near Manchester, on Wednesday 4 June, 1-4pm (£5; click here to book). David is the author of four critically acclaimed micro-fiction collections, including More Sawn-Off Tales, published last year through Salt Publishing and recommended by Johnny Vegas. The Guardian said: “One hundred and fifty words by Gaffney are more worthwhile than novels by a good many others.”
The workshop marks the launch of CIT’s second flash fiction competition, judged by David, and open to anyone over the age of 18 on Saturday 25 October 2014, when the winner will receive their prize of £50 book vouchers, at the Northern Lights Writers’ Conference 2014. CIT are looking for stories, in any genre and on any theme, of up to 500 words long. Entry is free and you may enter more than once. Submissions must be emailed, by 5pm on Monday 15th September 2014, to info@creativeindustriestrafford.org – full entry details are on the CIT website here.
Issue 6.2 of Flash: The International Short-Short Story Magazine is now available.
Contributors include: Lydia Davis, Ihab Hassan, Nuala Ni Chonchuir, Ian Seed, and Shellie Zacharia. Jane Hertenstein contributes the flash essay ‘The Mystery of Memory; or How to Write Memoir-ish’. And there are reviews of collections by Dan Rhodes, David Gaffney, Dan Rhodes, and Peter Cherches.
For further information and to order a copy, go to: http://www.chester.ac.uk/flash.magazine
The Grind is accepting submissions for its second issue until Feb 1st! We publish short fiction, poetry, visual art, and photography from Scottish artists and artists living in Scotland. For more details, including our submission guidelines and a link to our first edition, please visit our website.
Twitter: @thegrindjournal
Facebook: The Grind Journal
ShortStops 