A couple of Best Microfiction 2020 nominations

Online literary journals are wonderful. Fact. From a readers’ perspective, they’re easily accessible, free to read and – for the most part – packed with quality writing. For writers, they offer an opportunity to get work out into the world (often for the first time), the confidence boost of an acceptance and a credit to pad out the dreaded biog with.

Something else they do, I didn’t realise, is to put writers forward for things that will raise their profile and help get that work seen by a wider audience. I’ve just recently had two flash fiction pieces nominated by journal editors for Best Microfictions 2020. Best Microfictions is an annual anthology co-edited by award-winning microfiction writer/editor Meg Pokrass, and Flannery O’Connor Prize-winning author Gary Fincke. Its aim is to compile the best international flash fiction published in the past year.

I loved the bespoke image that accompanied ‘Baggage’ in Fictive Dream so the artist, Claudia McGill, sent it to me

The stories up for consideration are ‘Baggage’ which appeared in Fictive Dream in February, and is about an emotional support peacock (don’t pretend you don’t have one), and ‘The Owl House’, a weird little piece about South African artist Helen Martins, published in Spelk in June.

Thanks so much to Fictive Dream editor Laura Black and Spelk editor Cal Marcius. Both are incredibly supportive of writers, and I can’t recommend their journals highly enough as place to submit your best work.

Being nominated is no guarantee, of course, that either of my flashes will make it into the anthology, as the competition is phenomenal. But I can’t tell you how much it means to me that it has been considered good enough to be put forward.

Now I really must get to work on some more bird-themed fiction, that’s obviously my niche…

Photo: Christine Sponchia/Pixabay

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