In the Forest, Take Care...

We're doing something a little different today. I'd like to present something I put on Instagram recently. I want to share it here because it might be difficult to see all the pages if you don't have an Instagram account.

A cautionary tale about wandering in the woods.

2022 Goals

I haven't done much writing thus far in 2022, and so haven't had much to blog about. So I thought that today I would instead look ahead, and talk about what I'm hoping to do this year.

Revisions
As you're surely aware by now, I have a lot of first drafts lying around. They're never going to go anywhere if I don't polish them up. I have a couple in mind to work on.

• Cold Blooded: An urban fantasy novel about vampires, murder, and ice cream. Its recently written second draft changed some major plot points to move it closer to where it needs to be.
• The House at the Top of the Rock: A horror short story (that might expand into a novella) about a ship's small crew, betrayal, and the dark secrets of a seemingly abandoned island.

The Flashiest Fiction

I've started writing flash fiction. Or microfiction, you might hear it called. Very, very short stories. The first one I've written was 112 words.

Incidentally, I've finally started using the Instagram account I've had for months. I've never been one for posting selfies, and I don't have anything interesting to take pictures of. So I've decided to write very short stories, put them in a square with a nice background, and post them to Instagram.

Just like books are divided into length based categories (novellas, novels, epics), so too is flash fiction. The term "flash fiction" itself is used for stories 1,000 words long. "Sudden fiction" is 750 words, "microfiction" is 100, and a "minisaga" is 50. A lot of them show up in literary contests where the goal is to have exactly that number of words.

I'm not so particular, so I'm using "flash fiction" in the general sense. I'm not so much constraining myself by word count, but by overall size.