1,000 Word Herd Flash Fiction Competition

TL;DR Press’ Word Herd 1K Flash Fiction Competition kicked off this week with a bang, sending out prompts to hundreds of participants, challenging them to write a 1,000-word flash fiction story in less than a week. This is my first time participating in this competition.

My prompts for this competition were a Chocoholic and an Escape Room, but per the rules, writers are free to interpret the prompts any way they choose. According to their T&C’s, I’m also allowed to share details about the story before the final judging.

I didn’t want to write about an escape room as a place where people try to solve puzzles.

Instead, I wrote something a little more like an inescapable trap where my protagonist, Izzy Jackson, a renowned fair-trade chocolatier, is being held against her will.

Her captor — an evil Capitalist candymaker named Julian Clarke who enslaves children to make his chocolates — wants to prevent Izzy from revealing his sinister operation to the rest of the world.

The story plays on Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with a more modern twist. When I read Charlie for the first time, I was appalled at how Willie Wonka was allowed to enslave an entire race (Oompa-Loompas) to make his chocolate and even more struck by how nobody seemed to care about their exploitation. Never a Dahl Day looks at the ending that should have been.

Let’s see where it goes!