Microfiction up at Microfiction Monday

Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

I have a new story up at Microfiction Monday Magazine, "Inheritance." 

2023 was a slow writing year for me. So slow, that I didn't bother with my usual end-of-year blog post.  For most of the year, I wrote nothing. As the year continued, I did manage to write a few short pieces, but didn't submit anything until the fall, and then only a few pieces.  So it's not surprising that I didn't have much to summarize at the end of the year.

However, in November, I participated in a microfiction writing group run by Meg Pokrass, a well-known flash fiction writer and teacher. Every day she gave us a prompt, and the assignment was to write a microfiction, defined as a story under 300 words, from the prompt.

It was magical. I churned out a ton of work. There was only one problem: I found it almost impossible to confine myself to 300 words.  I have written a lot of flash fiction (often defined as under 1000 words) but my stories usually run a bit longer than 300 words. Some of my stories ended up being 500-1000 words. Some ended up being well over 2000 words. One might eventually turn into a novel.

Because these stories turned out to be so much longer than the word limit, I had trouble finishing them in a day. I have been spending the months since editing the stories I wrote that month and finishing the ones I ran out of time to write. 

Of all the stories I wrote, only one sprang forth as a true microfiction.  In fact, it is quite short--consisting of a mere three sentences. I tweaked it a bit and sent it to Microfiction Monday, a magazine that had published one of my stories before. That story, called "Possum," I wrote on a post-it at the AWP writer's conference. 

I sent out "Inheritance" on the last day of 2023. So, I guess it counts as a win from last year, even though it didn't get accepted and printed until this month. 

I hope that some of the other stories from my November writing blitz find homes in the future. If so, I will certainly let you know! And maybe I'll feel like writing an end-of-year post next year.