What is “Flash Fiction”?
“Flash Fiction” is a term that is thought to have originated with a 1992 anthology of the same name by James Thomas, Denise Thomas, and Tom Hazuka. The definition given by the editors of that anthology were that the story had to be limited to two facing pages of a digest-sized magazine – so about 750 words.

There is, however, no universally accepted length for a flash fiction but most top out at 2,000 words. The common length stated seems to be 250-1,000 words.

Flash fiction is, however, supposed to be more of a complete story in the allotted length. It should have a beginning, a middle and an end.

Of course, this is not what I do :)

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The fabulous gay romance authors on the Fiction With Friction blog are planning a week of Valentine free reads for your enjoyment. Stop in and see what we’re offering from February 8th through February 14th.

For the next few weeks, I plan on using Fridays to house a series of “How To” posts on Flash Fiction itself. What it is, my tips for writing it, things to remember when posting it and then some of my inspirations and what has happened/is happening to them. At the very end, I’ll talk a little about why I started writing flash fiction, why I started posting it, what it has done for me and what my plans are for my own flash fiction on this site.

If you have any particular questions or requests, leave a comment and let me know what they are so I can be sure and address them.

As an added enticement, at the end of the series, I’ll choose a winner who can then give me a set of 4 prompts and a sexuality choice and I’ll write a flash with it, 500 words minimum, up to 1500 as the muse takes me. I do well with challenges.

Rules to Enter:
I’ll randomly choose with a random number generator from all the commenters to this series.

You can have one drawing entry per post, you are welcome to comment more than once but to avoid spamming, only one will count. If I see posts of multiple “I want to be entered on the same post”, you still only get one entry and, if you happen to win, I may not be nice to you in the flash.

When you comment, make the commentor something I can recognize and refer to easily. More than one Anonymous becomes impossible to prove who is who. Email address (only I can see them) would be even better.

Winner will be announced the friday AFTER the last post in the series. All series posts will remain open until then.

Winner has ten days to respond to the comment that they won with their choices or I’ll choose another winner.

I picked up this great tip via Bob Garrett’s pointer to David Petherick’s The Next Web website .

If you are using Twitter’s browser UI, you can get the basic information on another user by typing whois UserName and clicking the Update button. You do need to be logged in to do this but you don’t need the typical ‘@’ symbol before the username.

Twitter will then display the basic information for that user!

Two related commands also available from Twitter’s Browser UI are:

If you decide to follow someone, you can type FOLLOW UserName.

If you want to stop following someone, you can type LEAVE UserName.

Great tip!

I saw an aspiring author ask a question a few days ago about how to get rid of the little voice that tells you what you’re writing is junk and you’ll never make it. I laughed uproariously because every author I know has that voice, they just forge on ahead anyway and when the voice gets too loud, they get a second opinion.

In my universe, I call it the Talking Sock Monkey syndrome. At some point in every story, especially near the start, the whole story starts to seem like a bunch of boring, weird, talking sock monkeys. “Blah ba blah ba blah blah blah.”

This happened last night and I sent what I had to date to my test readers for them to look at and tell me if it’s merely a case of the sock monkeys stealing my brain or if it really does suck. They haven’t replied yet, so it may suck :)

One bad side effect is that I now seem to be developing a collection of sock monkeys.

So don’t let the sock monkeys steal your brain – ignore them and keep going anyway. Just don’t think that they’re telling you the truth when they tell you that you suck.