Earlier in October was the prize giving for Shoreham Wordfest. I went along as I’d won two prizes for 10-word stories. You can read all three of my entries on the Shoreham Wordfest website.
It was the first time I’d been out since March, when I went to the Trope event at Phoenix Gallery. This event was very different, with rules almost as strict as an aeroplane flight. Everyone remained masked throughout the performances, and drinks were brought to our seats.
It was great to see Katrina Quinn, who’d also read at that Trope event. She read Bittersweet, an account of a pilgrimage on the South Downs Way. Katrina had travelled through Cocking at around the same time as Katharine, Romi and I were there recently.
The prose prize was judged by Catherine Smith, who read her future-tense story When. Catherine spoke a little about flash and micro-fiction, talking about how the ten-word stories needed both a premise and change.
The competition involved submitting three ten-word stories. I wrote a brace of them and then rejected several for not coming down to the required word-length. Of the stories, two won prizes and one was highly-commended. The last of these, a clown story, was actually my favourite, but nobody else seems as impressed with my clown stories as I am.