Greetings, Greetings, Greetings! Fellow word worms and pulse punchers!
Every writer is a magician.
Not the birthday party kind. Not the Vegas kind. The kind that makes you look left while the real trick happens on your right. The kind that puts something in your hand and walks away before you realize what you’re holding.
The best fiction is sleight of hand at the sentence level. You never see the move. You only feel the thing that’s gone.
This battle features two of the most dangerous hands on Substack.
In one corner:
Practicing occultist. Horror novelist. Resident of a spider-haunted tower at the edge of a forest. He does not write toward the supernatural. He writes from inside it. You think you are reading a story. You are already in the trick.
And facing him:
Atlanta’s poet of the analog world. Archivist of Old Spice and Cutty Sark and fathers who never delivered. His magic is quieter and just as dangerous. He makes you grieve something you never had.
Two magicians. One prompt. Three hours. Five hundred words.
Only one makes the other disappear.
The Battle Begins:
Tuesday, March 17th at 3:00 PM EST
The moderator, Andrew Robert Colom, will lead the chat to craft the sacred three-part prompt.
The Reading and Vote Begins:
6:00 PM EST
Three hours later, the stories will be revealed. Only those inside the chat will vote. Only one story survives.
Drink the ink. Watch both hands. Choose your illusionist.
See ya there, or be square!
Flash-Style fiction battle is a fiction contest created by Andrew Robert Colom to provide friendly and respectful competition to the short fiction space with the hopes of innovating the genre to provide visibility to its writers and more relevancy to short form fiction as an art form.
Flash-style is flash fiction written on a time clock with the express purpose of dueling another fiction writer.
The writers are given 3 hours to create content with 500 words or less that tell a story. There cannot be alternative versions of various lengths published and available for consideration.
The content can have a visual, audio, animated, and or artificial intelligence component.
This publication will start a chat thread for each battle. There will be a moderator assigned for the contest.
Fighters are allowed and encouraged to invite their supporters, but all supporters will have to subscribe to Flash-Style and join the chat to vote.
The Moderator leads the discussion to help the chat come up with three specific things to set the prompt:
Time (this can be as abstract as Pre-historic times, or as specific as Christmas 1972)
Location (can be as abstract as North America, or as specific as a beach in Dakar)
Random (anything random to make the stories unique. This can be as specific as a pink barn, or as abstract as sadness in times of strife)
This conversation should be 15 minutes between the moderator and whoever joins the chat. The chat will take considerations for prompts for a set amount of time.
After that time expires, all the moderated accepted prompts will be put into a survey and voted on by the chat. The winning prompt will be given to the two writers.
Then the writers take whatever is remaining in the 3 hours to write a 500 or less word story using the prompt.
The moderator starts the chat again 3 hours from the start of the chat.
The writers have to have cross-posted (or posted) their story and pasted the link to the post into the chat by the deadline.
No exceptions. Not making the publication deadline is an automatic forfeit.
The moderator helps facilitate a discussion of both works.
The discussing of the best flash-style piece shall consider three criteria.
The way the writer considered each word provided in the prompt
The quality of the story
The quality of the prose
I will do an anonymous poll only voted for by people in the chat to pick the winner of the Flash-Style Contest.
The Moderator in a Flash-Style Battle is required to do these functions:
Ensure a timely start to the battle. The faster the prompts are created and chosen by the chat, the more time the writers have to battle.
Decide if any prompt is too boring, one-sided, or uninteresting to be included as an option (should be used sparingly and can be refused by one of the writers).
Ensure the writers submit their stories into the chat by the deadline.
Put an end to the conversation about the stories and start the vote.
End the voting period.
The moderator announces the winner.
Someone’s gonna bleed and I can’t fucking wait!
fantastic business as usual.
well done combatants and thanks ARC for hosting this!