On Sunday, a story of mine was published on Paragraph Planet: If Vampires Were Real. Paragraph Planet is a long-running flash-fiction site, which publishes a 75-word story each day.
If Vampires Were Real was written as part of the Not for the Faint-Hearted sessions, which I have been running online most Saturdays since lockdown begun. We write 8 or 9 stories each session, which means I’ve written about 100 tiny stories during the pandemic. Most of them I throw away, but a few are worth polishing-up.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve also been writing 500-word stories as part of the Writer’s HQ Flash-Face-Off. I’ve written four pieces so far. None of them have taken a long time to write, but I am fairly happy with how they’ve turned out. All four are going to find a way into my South Downs Way project.
The stories I produce quickly to prompts seems to work better than the pieces I labour with. Lockdown is giving me an opportunity to play with my writing, and I am still learning new things.