Last weekend was the first round in the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction 2017 challenge, and this is my third time taking part. I made it to the third round last year – everyone is guaranteed to take part in the first two, then your cumulative point total determines whether you advance onward or not. This year one of my cousins is taking part as well, which is making it even more fun this go round.

This year there are 80 groups of 30+ people. In each round your group is assigned a genre, a location, and an item to include, leaving you to write a story that’s 1,000 words or less based those things. Here is my entry for anyone that’s curious. Our genre was Action/Adventure, the location was a yacht, and the item was a sledgehammer. It was fun, especially because I don’t usually write a lot of action-y things; dialogue is more my thing. It was also challenging, because you don’t have any room for backstory, lengthy exposition, or character development, you just have to take a snippet and go for it.

I was happy enough with it, and we’ll see how the judges score it. Each round gives points for the 15 best stories in each group, 15 points for first, 14 for second, etc., and the top five contestants move on to the third round, where new groups are formed. Last year I made it to round 3, but flubbed on the Fairy Tale genre we were assigned, ugh. Here’s hoping I can make it again this year and that we get something better.

In other writing news, I’ve been reading up on the Snowflake method of writing, which is interesting. I don’t know whether it’ll work for me or not, but it’s fun to give it a shot. The person who come up with it wrote a book that explains it through a story, which is an interesting way to show how it works. The book was cheap so I picked it up on Kobo, and I hope to try it out once I’m done reading it. Time will tell, I suppose.