May Flash Fiction Draw

I’m home! Today was a bit of a whirlwind day, getting up at 5:15a in Nottingham, England to get home for about 5:00p in Ottawa, Canada. Which is sort of like 10:00p to my brain. But! it’s the first Monday of the month, so…

The background: 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) was a challenge (though with awesome results). March‘s Romance, involving a VHS Cassette, set in a Firewatch Tower led to a great range of results. April gave us Historical Fictions set on Dirt Roads dealing with Rat Poison, and the timelines involved in those results were all over the place. Or time. You get it.

I made a video of this month’s draw, which included guest card drawings from Jeffrey Ricker, given we were in a hotel room in Nottingham at the time (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 May? Two of clubs, five of diamonds, and ten 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 science fiction story, set above the clouds, and including a dog whistle—which, as Jeffrey noted, could be metaphorical, rather than literal.

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 June (that’s June 4th), 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 (May 14th). That’s it.

Enjoy!

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