Today’s tale is another dark one which follows a guest at Hotel Perdition from checking in to checking out.

You can’t afford to miss this one!

The first story is called Cutting Criticism and is a rather dark and disturbing tale of man whose criticisms really do cut deep. 

Let me know what you think!

The first story should appear this evening, but I’d really appreciate it if you added As Quick As A Flash to your bookmarks and blogrolls now.

Entitled The Here Not Now it is based on a prompt of I’m Still here.

Please do let me know what you think.

When I initially saw I had been assigned romantic comedy as genre my heart sank.  Can there be anything more challenging than try to write something romantic AND comical in just a 1000 words?  To make it even worse, my given location was the very Americanized (see what I did there?) bake sale.  Yes, I even had to Wikipedia it to make sure I full understood what one was.  On top of that I had the very unromantic and equally unamusing of objects, a fire alarm.  In fact, the fire alarm rasied an interesting dillema.  Do you actually have to ”see” your object in the story…or is merely just ”hearing” one sufficient.  In the end I took the risk of the latter.

What I ended up with was a teenage rom-com called ‘Sticky Fingers’.  However, having posted my synopsis to the competition’s forums, someone has already questioned whether it sounds a bit too smutty for a rom com and American judges.  So that you can judge for yourself here is the actual synopsis:

Sticky Fingers

It’s not just the buns and fingers that get sticky as Miles tries to woo the cutest girl at the school bake sale.  Sometimes, in love, you can’t have your cake and eat it.

Now personally I don’t think I’ve gone over the top in the story itself.  Much of the innuendo is based around teenage awkwardness and foot in the mouth moments, rather than anything too sleazy.  There’s certainly enough rom com cliches in it to stand as a rom com, I think.  But now that question has been raised I am slightly concerned that it’ll be seen too much as something like American Pie rather than Pretty Woman!

Oh well, I guess I will have to wait and see.  Having never made the finals before I’d hate to think I’d blown it because a judge thinks some innuendo is really porn!

I say I’m surprised as I wasn’t overly confident with my entry, having struggled throughout with the writing of it.  I had been lumped with mystery as my genre, a carnival as location and a lollipop with my object.  I was happy with the plot I came up with, centring around espionage in Moscow during the Cold War, but the writing itself just didn’t feel as fluent as I would have liked it to be.

So I was literally gobsmacked to see it finish top of my group.  What’s more, with the combined points from challenge, I actually qualified as 14th out 500 writers and, even more pleasing, as the top placed Brit going forward!

However, now there’s a semi-final to contend with, and I know it won’t be easy.  I went out at this stage last year, so I definitely won’t be taking anything for granted.

It’s also pleasing as it now gives me 18 points and, after this weekend’s 2nd challenge, the top 5 overall scoring writers in each heat will progress to the next round.  This now puts me in a healthy position going into the second challenge, but I certainly won’t be taking anything for granted.

I now await my assigned genre, location and item…along with my fate!

The other good news is I am writing fiction again.  I was put off writing for a bit when another writer – and someone I thought was a friend – decided to savage my writing.  This was simply because I dared to stop following her twitter feed from a sub twitter account I had.  She kind of missed the point I was still reading and following her on my main twitter account.  There followed a lot of nastiness about how my writing hadn’t moved on and how I was simply a hack writer!  So I was left with a bitter taste in my mouth for a while.

Thankfully, the writing itch overcame these petty tantrums and I have, this weekend, again taken part in the Annual 2011 Flash Fiction Challenge, run by NYC Midnight.  For those of you who don’t recall, this competition challenges writers to come up with a 1000 word stories in 48 hours based on a given genre, location and object.  The top 5 scoring writers progress from each group until an overall winner is chosen from the finalists.

Last year I managed to make the Semi-Finals, but sadly faltered at this stage when assigned the genre of fantasy. My story then was most probably too big and too epic for a 1000 word flash.  So you can imagine my dismay when I drew fantasy as a genre again in challenge 1 in the first round this year.  Things were made even tougher by having the unlikely pairing of a graveyard and a water purifier to include.

Having done well with comedy last year I decided to incorporate humour into my fantasy tale this time.  This resulted in my light-hearted story Merle Majikal.  Whilst it may not be the most literary of pieces I am quite pleased with what I crafted.

The results will be announced in a month’s time, but whatever they are, all writers will still take part in challenge 2 of round 1.  Then both scores will be combined and the top five will progress.

So I hope you enjoy the story and wish this hack writer well going forward!

‘Accidents Do Happen‘  – what happens when a woman is determined to get moved by the local council.

‘The Grouchy Vampire’ - a rather unusal school careers talk.

‘Things Ain’t What They Used To Be’ – two old men fondly remember their old pub.

You can find out more about the anthology and buy it by clicking here.