Furious Fiction Mar 2024 Contest
Every month, the Furious Fiction Flash contest challenges writers worldwide to write a 500-word flash story in roughly 55 hours.
March 2024 prompt’s criteria:
Your story must include a character who revisits something. (Like a place, an object, or a person).
Your story must include the same color in your first and last sentences.
Your story must include the words CAMP, FAST, and SPARK. (Longer words are okay if original spelling is retained.)
I like a lot of things about this contest. For starters, it’s free and recurring. Second, it’s fast — five hundred words over a weekend. Third, the contest attracts 600+ entries from people worldwide, so it’s fun to see what people come up with. And fourth, I longlisted in January 2024, which makes me only want to try that much harder.
My story centers around Eleanor, an elderly woman on her deathbed, trying to confess a lifelong secret to her son, David.
Further, with her in the room is an ambiguous, ephemeral character named Cordelia, a nameless Doctor, and — as I flash back to revisit Eleanor’s past — her father and elder sister, Danielle.
The first reaction from my betas was, “Mickler, what in the *!&^#^ are you doing?” Six characters in a five-hundred-word story? Indiscriminant jaunts through time? Switching settings without any section breaks? This is madness!
And they were probably right.
After some tightening and re-reads, they warmed up to it.
Finding the prompts compatible this week on Reedsy, I wrote a 1,000-word version of the story and posted it there. Either way, I hope it does well and pleases the AWC and Reedsy judges! We’ll see!
