Midwestern Gothic has a three-round flash fiction contest ever summer, and this summer, against all odds, I won round 2.
Entries for each round are based on a given photo prompt, and you can see round 2’s prompt over there on the right. The resulting story, “Transport,” came together pretty quickly, which surprised me.
I’ve been writing more flash fiction while I continue to revise my novel. Maybe it’s because flash takes less time, but it’s also because flash is damn hard for me. It’s kind of like the watercolor equivalent of prose writing. Have you ever painted watercolors? Because of the medium and how fast it dries, you paint them very quickly. At least, that was the way Betty Gearhart, my high school art teacher, taught me to do them. She said you didn’t start to get good at it until you’d done about a hundred watercolors. But, because of the nature of them, you could do them pretty quickly.
I got kind of good at them, but that was a long time ago.
Anyway. I hope you enjoy “Transport.” Be sure to read the other pieces in the contest. They’ve been really good so far.