🎃 lisa writes stuff issue #25 👻 flash fiction

“brevity is the soul of wit” (hat tip to Shakespeare’s Hamlet)

Dear Internet,

I’m reading Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction which is recommended if you wanted to get a course in writing flash without taking a class. The introduction is 40 pages (10,000 words) which is obnoxious for an intro to flash fiction (up to 1,000 words) but the editors do address this in the pre-intro intro as the point is to paint the history of flash to its current incarnation. I’m not that irritated as the writing is engaging and interesting.

In the history of flash, it dips into the publication history of flash, which dates to the mid-1800s and is not a contemporary invention. Flash was highly regarded because it could be pieces snuck next to advertisements and columns in periodicals.

The Killing Flash, by Hugo Gernsback in Science Wonder Stories, is considered one of the first pieces of modern flash when it was published in 1929. Clocking in 1100 words, it’s a complete story about John Bernard who thinks he’s killed his rival Henry Lindenfeld by “…connecting a 350,000-volt high-tension transformer to the telephone line.”

Which is, physically impossible.

And not only is the story is contained, but it also winks at itself. Bernard submits his piece to the fictious version of Science Wonder Stories where the fictious editors point out the flaws in the story.

That’s what flash should do: a self-contained moment that is a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Flash blew up in the 1920s with writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, and others selling pieces to survive and flash sold well.

If you’ve been reading me for awhile, you know I have a thing for Hemingway, Field Guide to Flash Fiction notes that Hemingway’s early works were not just poems but also flash. These works, published in 1925, is under the title of In Our Time. I bought the kindle version because it was 99¢ USD. The book is tiny (only six vignettes).

I haven’t read it yet. Right now, I’m overwhelmed with Preptober work for NaNoWriMo.

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NaNoWriMo has a six week prep course to help you get your novel ready. I started working through it and it helped spark more ideas for bookS. Yes, the random cap and bold is intentional.

One thing they recommended is write up a summary of three of your favorite books and possibly spin on that. I thought this was a great idea and came up with the following:

1. Struggling with mental illness, and not wanting to place the burden on him, she leaves him before things get going and her family influences. She continues to struggle on/off with her illness but eventually she stabilizes and they find each other again. Eventually, they work through their pain and HEA. (Modern spin on Persuasion.)

2. Three friends host a podcast on wicca/paganism/related. Each are along the path at various stages with the third friend exploring it. They are part of a local coven/pagan group that is controlled by a larger entity called the Convocation. Members of the Convocation are dropping like flies and all eyes are on the newbie witch. She must race against time to figure out what is going on before she’s next. (Mix of Only Murders in the Building x That Witch Life (a podcast) x plus Mur Laffterty’s Station Eternity.)

3. Emily Dickinson is a witch and she must keep her witchy world private or else chaos ensues. (Emily Dickinson was fascinated with witchcraft, death, and the otherworldly. She was also fluent in botany, geology, and Latin. All the makings of a good witch.)

This does not include existing ideas I’ve got written down against scraps, bits, and bobs. There is too much to work with!

The Emily Dickinson idea will def not be worked on, I know that much. I’ve got a book of her poems and Wikipedia has a list of her poems (all 1800 of them) to read from and I studied Dickinson in undergrad and I still have that book of poems I marked the fuck out of. Thankfully, her poems are between four to ten lines in length so reading them should be a snap.

I also want to read a biography or two to get a feeling of her voice and early American Victorian age. (She lived 1830 – 1886.) So, lots of research. This is a project to pick up in 2024.

One is obviously a spin on my own life in that the MFC has a mental illness but I’m working it as a modern version of Persuasion which is my favorite Austen novel.

For two, I’ve been researching wicca/pagan/etc on and off for a few months now. That Witch Life podcast gave me the idea of the three friends having a podcast and how the craft works with them with they need to solve a murder (Only Murders in the Building) because as the newbie witch grows in power, dead bodies pile up around her (Station Eternity). Right now I’m reading The Modern Witchcraft Grimoire. I’m about 25% in (woke up 5 a.m. Tuesday morning and read for an hour so the info is a bit jumbled) and we’ve gone through the history of grimoires and how to make them. I’m a paper person so my hand is itching to create a physical book but realistically, I know I need to keep a digital one. In this idea or another similar one I have, the MFC grows her divination powers. I bought yet another oracle deck which I’ve been reading on and off. I also have a slew of tarot decks to use.

I’m straying off the fucking point and going into woo crystal pyramid land. I’ll pick this back up when I get back to the weekly Sunday newsletters in December.

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With work, an online course I’m taking, and Preptober, my own writing has been slow. I am still publishing 51 Stories in 51 Weeks weekly so that’s great. For inktober, the substack Weird Medieval Guys posted a list of 31 prompts on instagram to work from. I took this as an invite to turn each prompt into a short story of some length. It is October 18, and I haven’t written a damn thing BUT I have been brainstorming. I wanted to publish on Instagram a story a day from that prompt. I still might.

I did have my poem, naked and then blurred published at Backward Trajectory a few weeks ago. The editor and I collaborated on it and I really like how it turned out.

I also got a slew of rejections from pieces I submitted back in August, which is fine. I counted and across all my names (government, smut, and pseudonym), I’ve published seven pieces since March which I’m pleased with.

To wrap this back with NaNoWriMo, the conceit of the November party is to start and finish one novel but that has changed over the years. Some write a short story a day, others juggle more than one novel. All that matters is you get 50K words written before midnight on November 30^th.

It’s the middle of October, and I’m still not sure what I want to do. I have previous novel projects I started earlier this year to work on, plus existing short stories that need work, and the Weird Medieval Guy prompts which I may do for November instead.

There will be three more Lisa Writes Stuff newsletters before the end of November so hopefully I’ve got my head wrapped around something.

Submission update

76 submissions, including 45 rejections, 7 acceptances, and 1 withdrawal.

Publication

chapbook: commercial breaks

naked and then blurred (poetry)

Snippet

The one downside to Scrivener is that there is no date applied to your pieces. I know I wrote this pre-COVID, but I’m not how sure how far back. It may go back a long time; whose to say.

The crux of the story is about a woman named Margaret who was that effortlessly chic and seemed perfect but the world wasn’t sure if she was honest and genuine or a pathological liar. Margaret also had secrets. What those secrets were, I have no idea, I just knew she had them.

Margaret was cool.

She exuded all essences of cool that were defined in our minds at the time, of being effortlessly chic. She spoke French fluently. She liked jazz but not the stuffy compositions or the sickeningly sweet smooth jazz. She had toured the music festivals in Europe but said so in such a way you were happy she went. She dressed as if she read Vogue religiously, but you knew she was the type who wouldn't even pick up the September issue. Her father had been a National Geographic explorer, her mother was flautist at the local symphony, who wrote mildly bestselling mystery novels.

At least, that is what she told us.

Even her name had a certain retro-chic ring to it. 

The leaves are finally turning,

lisa  x