April Flash Fiction Draw

Hello! It’s the first Monday of April, so I’m back!

As a kind of challenge to myself (and anyone else who wanted to try), last January I started a year-long monthly Flash Fiction Draw Challenge.

The first draw (which was a Fairy Tale involving a Tattoo Machine set in a Prison!) and the results were fantastic in January, and February’s draw (Crime Caper, Compass, Soup Kitchen) and results were—I think the general sentiment agreed—much more of a challenge. And for March? A Romance, involving a VHS Cassette, set in a Firewatch Tower gave a wonderful range of results.

I made a video of this month’s draw (you can go check that out on my Facebook page if you want).

The chart from which the draws were made was this (minus the cards from previous draws, greyed out):

And the result for April? King of clubs, two of diamonds, and eight of hearts. Which means anyone who wants to play along is going to write a flash fiction piece of 1,000 words within the following guidelines: a historical fiction, involving rat poison, set on a dirt road.

If you do participate, please pop a link to this post, or to the Facebook video above so I can gather all the stories again for a round-up post next week.

But the most important thing? This is supposed to be fun and inspiring. If it’s not working for you, take a pass. There’ll be another challenge on the first Monday of May (that’s May 7th), from the remaining nine items on the list. The “rules” such as they are are pretty limited: You have to use the genre, the item, and the setting (though you can play a bit fast and loose within those guidelines), no more than 1,000 words, and the piece needs to be finished by next Monday (March 12th). That’s it.

Enjoy!