Authors Electric

This is a post about two lately-comers to the world of story, electronic publishing and flash fiction.  Wednesday 16 th May was the first ever National Flash Fiction Day, celebrated not just across the UK, but online too, and across the world in some cases, Australia being among them and New Zealand as well. In the county town of Shrewsbury, flash fiction was celebrated too.   It was a huge success - a  packed coffeehouse event that saw strangers coming together to share their short, short stories, make common cause of their inspiration and write on table-cloths, backs of envelopes [well, one envelope - I wouldn't want to be seen exaggerating here], anything that came to hand. People having been stopping me on the street to say how much the evening meant to them. Some said they hadn't written stories since they were in school.  Others said it provided them with a way of getting personal without feeling exposed.  When are we doing it again, they wan...

          Today is National Flash Fiction Day . It would be fairly criminal of me not to state that from the outset. First off, this is the first time ever we’ve celebrated this marvellous form as a nation – the Arts Council have even got behind it. Second, tonight, as part of the shindig, we’re holding a flash slam in Oxford , combining the worlds of poetry slam and flash fiction as twelve of the UK’s finest practitioners battle it out, reading their stuff in front of an audience and celeb judge, the short fiction legend Tania Hershman. If you’re anywhere near Oxford, do come along to what will be a truly wonderful evening. And if you’re not, please do check out what’s going on in your area. Third, to celebrate National Flash Fiction Day, my two short fiction collections are free for today and tomorrow:           (life:) razorblades included contains some award-winning short stories and poe...

For me, being an electric author has always been about more than having my work available on one or more proprietory ebook reader. I joined the online writing world via variouos writing communities back in the hazy days of 2007/8 (OK, hardly those long lost days of youth, but that was basically the time I decided to write "for serious" at all), but it was in 2009 thatI really became an electric author, poking and prodding at digital possibilities, when I started writing The Man Who Painted Agnieszka's Shoes as an interactive piece of literary fiction on Facebook. It was that book through which I met many of the people I still work with most closely and started to get invited to blog across the web on all topics digital. Most of all, it made me realise how exciting it could be exploring for different ways to write. The most exciting form I've discovered has been flash fiction which may not necessarily a digital form of writing (there's even a flash fiction ca...