This month, I had the good fortune to participate in the inaugural launch of the Twist in the Tale competition for February 2024.

We had seven days to produce a 500-word flash fiction piece based on prompts randomly handed to us by the site.

My prompts this time around were Thriller (genre), Time-Bending (sub-genre, using time travel or non-linear timelines), and Encounter with a Stranger (event).

I’m excited about this contest because — unlike other contests — there’s a team of qualified judges using a rubric to score the work.

Most contests are judged from a qualitative perspective that doesn’t seek to explain, rationalize, or defend the judge’s scoring. As writers, we accept the subjective nature of the art and shrug, meh, it just wasn’t my time, or there was a field of great writers this time around that drowned me out. Seeing a consistent, objective metric used in judging will certainly be a new twist in our tale as contest participants!

Using a quantitative rubric will be very interesting, and I’m excited to learn of the results at the end of March.

Until then, fingers crossed! Let’s see where we go!

March 7, 2024

Okay, the story’s submitted, the contest’s over, and I’m free to discuss my story. This is a retelling of a flash piece I wrote for Furious Fiction in mid-2023 called Confession and Redemption.

The story centers around Jake, a man stricken with lung cancer and facing imminent death, who — wanting to clear his conscience before entering the Pearly Gates — visits a Catholic priest in the western town of Coyote Gulch. Jake has something he needs to confess.

A thriller, subtle clues are dropped during Jake’s confession that ratchets up the tension. The title is a reference to a Biblical passage.

There’s a point in the story where I try to convey Jake feels like he got away with something; his piousness and sincerity come into question.

I hope the judges like it! We’ll see where it goes.