#flash CNF

[stormcellarmag]

WINNERS! of the 2023 Force Majeure Flash Contest — full announcement: https://wp.me/p1tViT-19z

1st Prize "Pre-Elegy for My Sister" by Whitney Koo 

2nd Prize "A Brief World" by Uyen P. Dang  2nd Prize "Bones" by Nathan Long 

honorable mentions: "Garden Statues" by Kendall Morris, "Midnight Zone" by Caleb Tankersley, and "Taint" by Veeda Khan.

[academyoftheheartandmind]

Reflections

By Todd Adams I was watering our purple phlox with an absent mind, ruminating on things that might have been or worrying about those to come, when I caught sight of a dark shape flashing around my legs. I stood stock still, fearing it was a giant wasp or some other stinging creature, but then an iridescent, hunter-green form flitted toward the stream of water. My shoulders fell, my jaw relaxed,…

[goatsludge]

A build with something to interest or upset every flavor of AR enthusiast

UPPER: - Daytona Tactical Stripped A2 Upper Receiver, FDE - Aero Precision Forward Assist and Dust Cover - Amherst Military Depot A2 Rear Sight Assembly - Milspec Charging Handle w/ YHM Extended Tactical Latch - Toolcraft Bolt Carrier Group, Black Nitride - Ballistic Advantage Modern Series Government Profile 16" Barrel, Mid-Length, 1:7 Twist, with FSB and A2 Birdcage Flash Hider - BCM MCMR Rail, 9.5", H-267 Magpul FDE Custom Cerakote - Surefire M640DF Scout Pro Weapon Light, Tan - Magpul MVG Vertical Foregrip

LOWER: - Anderson AM-15 Lower Receiver, H-265 FDE Custom Cerakote - Lancer Systems L5 AWM Magazine, Smoke - KAK 6-Position Milspec Buffer Tube and Carbine Buffer - FCD CNF Castle Nut w/ Amherst Military Depot End Plate - Magpul CTR Carbine Buttstock, Black - LaRue MBT-2S 2-Stage Trigger - APF Armory Lower Parts Kit - Magpul Aluminum Enhanced Trigger Guard - VFC Lone Star Ordnance Stowaway 2 Grip (Modified) - BCM Quick Detach Sling Swivel, 1" D-Ring - AWS Inc. P/N 52199 Padded Sling, Foliage Green (I've since swapped it out for my Edgar Sherman ESD Sling in AOR-1)

Cerakoting work done by D.Wilson

[chronotopes]

PERSONAL WRITING WRAPPED 2023

Getting this done significantly earlier than I got it done last year, which I think may in itself be an indication of being in "a better mental place."

Let's get to it.

CREATIVE NONFICTION, NEW FIRST DRAFTS:

"Catalogue of Thoughts, With Rebukes," January. CLASSIC katia journal entry turned essay format, which is "conversation between versions of myself." Artistic enough suffering that it totally counts as a cnf essay.

"I Can't Remember..." (titled in real life "my homework from brenda and julie"), January. Essay Written For Practice, specifically inspired by the prompt "Write an essay where every sentence starts with 'I can't remember.' Cathartic and has some bits of very pretty prose. Maybe I don't agree with the overall conclusions it draws, but I sure like it as a piece of writing.

"As the sun sets over [my local river], I consider Joan of Arc," January. broooo why were my early-in-the-year cnf titles so pretentious. Lyric essay meets prose poem but I'm choosing to classify it as a lyric essay. First draft dictated into my voice memos, mad scribe style. Man i used to love voice memos.

"Elegy for a life I can't live," April. Boooo emo bullshit booo but once again cathartic and perhaps more clear-sighted about things than the previous work. Anaphora got me through a lot in the first half of this year.

"I don't understand music," April. Finally, creative nonfiction that isn't about depressing shit! About a) piano and b) love, obviously. Needs a lot of editing but I am fond of her.

"Orthodox," July. Old poem about national identity and religion that I reformulated into a very unpolished essay.

"Two gay preteens and a lake monster," July. Another old poem, reformulated into a flash essay this time. Polished it enough to submit to a call for flash essay submissions and then never did.

"Nikolayevna," July. ALSO an old poem reformulated into a flash essay. This is my favorite trick and I will do it to all of my mid-but-promising poetry one day. This one's about ~generational cycles!~

"My dead boss and my dead friend," July. New addition to my senior spring flash essay series from last year.

"A spoiler, displaced in time," July. Another new addition to the senior spring flash essay, in an effort to make it more rounded with context I did not then have.

"[personal bullshit relevant situation], or 'The Kids from Yesterday.'" The Senior Spring Essays in their totality cannot ever seen the light of day for many reasons and one of them is that the ending rests partly on an MCR-based metaphor. Which is very silly.

"Justifications," October. Oh lord back to For Processing Purposes Only creative nonfiction. That's cool I guess. Mad about how good the prose in these quasi-journal entries is and the degree to which i did not write enough of them this year.

12 pieces in total.

CREATIVE NONFICTION, NEW DRAFTS OF OLD STUFF AND UNFINISHED BUT PROMISING NEW STUFF.

"Catalogue of Kitchenware," February-August. What it sounds like.

"Obsidian Greythorne's Depression Cannot Be Cured By Finding A New, Alive Girlfriend" and "Fornax And Annue Cannot Ever Have Sex For Reasons I Just Made Up," March-June. Two entries in an envisioned series of essays exploring adolescent sexuality/identity/experience through old fictionwriting adventures.

"Catalogue of Berries," July. Eastern Europe posting.

"On Taking the Waters," July. I said "Oh, I know what's missing from this old essay about being very sad in bath!" and stuck my friend who died in there. Classic essay trick.

"A Grand Palatial House of the Old South," July. Heterosexual roommate angst processing essay, refined.

"On being old enough to talk about the war," July. Flash essay (really edging out of flash essay territory, it got long) from last year about the Russian invasion of Ukraine, completely rewritten.

"A Hill in the [local civil war history location]," July. Also a flash essay from the senior spring essays, rewritten enough to count as a newish thing.

"A Car Is Like A Little House," August. Suburbia, weather, immigration, the interstate highway system, all the usual suspects in my writing.

Nine pieces in total.

POETRY:

"Myopia in seventh-grade notebooks," January. "It is january 2023, and one year ago I should have known better. / And unlike all of the other times I ruined my life, that time, it was for forever." Less Vent Poetry and more unified concept worth working from. About reading notes to myself in old diaries.

"Novice time traveler," February. Jesus christ reading through these is killing me. This one shares a lot of ideas with dialogues but is less good lol.

"3/23/2022," February. A sestina I wrote for Gabe on the occasion of our first anniversary, and certainly a sestina I like a lot more than the first sestina I wrote. Not groundbreaking stuff but I like it anyway. I would have to take a Real Poetry Class to get properly good at poetry, I think. For those curious: my words were moon, dare, blossom, spring, test, and time.

I would write Gabe little poems every day for the last few months of being longish-distance. Not all of them were good, and I cannot count them to save my life, but among them were "Sonnet for a job application," "Sonnet for an orchestra concert," "February Villanelle," "Sonnet for warmth," "Sonnet for Spring," "For Dusk," "For the sinking sun." Some of them will be something one day. Others had value in their ephemeral Baby Poem status.

Ten completed pieces in total, a whole lot more little stuff than that.

FICTION:

52 or so thousand words of what was once titled Adventures of the Extranei and is now titled fucking, like, Untitled Quartz the Novel Project, June-November. What started out as last year's fascination with an old, sprawling, deeply flawed novel turned into a perhaps-ill-advised attempt to rename (almost) all the characters and rewrite it to be coherent. Currently, it exists in the form of a 100-page outline and one nanowrimo's worth of novel (three parts out of like twelve complete). I'll go back to it after I finish Aivide, if only because of Sunk Cock Theory.

A rewritten prologue to what was once titled Adventures of the Extranei: The Next Generation and is now titled Dude If You Rewrite All Of Nextgen Too You're Going To Have To Start Asking For Money For It Because Seriously We're Talking 500k+ words of story here. What can I say, sometimes the grip of "I could do this BETTER" overtakes you.

Three edited existing chapters and one brand new revised chapter of AIVIDE THE PREQUEL, August-December. READ IT HERE, unless you haven't read Vinbre the Novel yet, in which case read Vinbre the Novel first. Very proud of the ways I've sneakily grown as a writer since first drafting the last three chapters, very glad for the opportunity to write it as I see it now and share it with the world.

About 85,000 words in total if you only count the completely new chapter of Aivide, somewhere around 100,000 if you count stuff I added to the old ones. I could probably be more accurate about it if I wasn't writing this at 2 AM on new year's eve. (Afternoon after edit: About 37,000 new words of Aivide + 51,980 words of Quartz + 10,007 words of nextgen bullshit = just about 98,000 words of fiction. yippee!!)

Overall, 26 completed(ish) pieces in total, counting the venty drafts and the revisions, which constituted a lot of what I wrote this year.

SUPERLATIVES:

Most Economical: "Two Gay Preteens and a Lake Monster," "My Dead Boss and My Dead Friend"

Most Romantic: "I don't understand music"

Greatest Potential: "A car is like a little house," "Orthodox"

Best Emerging Genre: Essay collections

Biggest Comeback: Fiction

Most Likely To Succeed: "Catalogue of Berries," "On Taking the Waters," "Orthodox," "A Car is like a little house"

The One You Should Read: Aivide the Prequel

Worst Girls of the Year: Quartz Greythorne and Aivide Thieri

[thehorrortree]

Submission Window: March 20th to April 20th, 2024 Payment: $50 upon publication Theme: Stories about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection in all genres with a particular fondness for anything that moves beyond realism in form or content or spirit At Astrolabe, we’re looking for work about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection. Into the woods. Across a line. Beneath the ocean. Along a seam. Into the branches of an alternate present or the crevasse of an alternate future. Across the rifts between one another. And then, once we find one other, the myths we make. We’re excited to see as many interpretations of this broad theme as there are stars in the night sky. We’re open to work of all genres, with a particular fondness for anything that moves beyond realism in form or content or spirit. Read about Astrolabe for details on our mission and what we’re doing with the Universe. The details Astrolabe is open for submissions year-round temporarily closed for submissions. We pay a $50 honorarium upon publication of one or more pieces from your submission. To help fund those payments, we alternate between free and paid submission periods throughout the year. Our free periods begin the day we publish new work—on the spring equinox, summer solstice, autumnal equinox, and winter solstice—and stay open for a month. We’re temporarily closing for all submissions beginning on December 21, 2023 to help us catch up with the queue and spend time with our families. We'll re-open to free submissions on March 20, 2024. Here are the free periods for 2024: March 20th to April 20th June 20st to July 20st September 22nd to October 22nd December 21st to Jan 21, 2025 Some additional details: We currently accept three types of work: fiction, creative nonfiction, and photography & art. See below for genre-specific instructions. We’re not a market for lineated poetry at the moment. We do accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know if your work was accepted for publication elsewhere—we’ll be thrilled for your good news! No multiple submissions—and if we don’t accept your work, please wait until our next submission period before trying again unless we specifically ask for more work. We consider only unpublished work. We ask for first North American serial rights and non-exclusive print/anthology rights. All copyrights remain yours. Read more about the rights we ask for. Fiction & creative nonfiction Send us up to three pieces, of no more than 3,000 words in total, in .doc, .docx, or .pdf format. We’ll happily consider fiction and CNF in all prose forms—prose poetry, micro, flash, and beyond—but we’re not considering lineated poetry at the moment. Photography & art Send us up to five pieces in .jpg, .png, or .pdf format. If your artwork doesn’t work in one of those formats—for example, if you’ve built something dynamic or interactive—send a link to where we can view it online, or just ask! Time to submit! We are temporarily closed to submissions. Our next free submission period is open between Wednesday, March 20th and Saturday, April 20th, 2024. Track your submissions on Duotrope, Chill Subs, or The Submission Grinder! Your rights Astrolabe asks for first North American serial rights (FNASR) to your work, which ensures that we’re the first place this work appears. Once your work is published on Astrolabe, all electronic and print rights revert back to you—you can republish the piece as you see fit. We also ask for non-exclusive anthology and print rights. This allows us to use your work in a possible future anthology, but doesn’t prevent you from pursuing other anthology or print opportunities in the meantime. The copyright to your work remains yours at all times. Questions? Email us at editors@astrolabe.ooo. Via: Astrolabe.

[davisexplainableart]

December 6, 2019 (again):

EMAIL TIME

Tommy: Tonight's email comes to us from "Krish", and he writes...

"Dear Tommy and Tara,

How would you feel if you had to spend a day as walking, talking snowmen?,

Krish"

Tommy: Well, to answer your question, I'd probably shuffle around and enjoy the cold-

(camera slowly pans to Tara, as she imagines her own idea of being a snowman; the scene cuts to a fantasy where she's a snowman trying to cover up her pectoral muscles)

Random Guy (off-screen): Hoo doggy, never in my life did I think there'd be such a thing as snowy ti-

Tara: Stop staring at them!

Random Guy: Well, it ain't my fault that someone made you with such nice looking-

Tara: Shut up or I'll poke you in the eye with my stick arms!!

Tommy: Uh, Tara??

(scene flashes back to reality)

Tara: Huh?

Tommy: You good?

Tara: Oh yeah, I'm fine.

Tommy: Alright, so keep sending those emails into the Fridays section at cnfansite.com, where we've got a special Christmas layout this month!

Tara: Send us your questions, and we might read yours on the air.

Tommy: But really, are you sure you're okay? You sounded like you were yelling at-

Tara: I said I'm fine, Tommy...!

(TRANSITION)

(footage plays of an interview that Paladum did with Myke in honor of Eric Bauza's birthday)

Myke: So, has anyone ever told you that your name sounds similar to palladium?

Paladum: Uh, well no, no one ever has, and I don't even know what palladium is...

Myke: ... N-Never mind...

(TRANSITION)

Kid: Time now for tonight's brand new episode of Monster Buster Club with "On Thin Ice", right here on Fridays.

================================================

(hey guys, IRL Davis here)

(currently, the December 7, 2018 drawing is still being worked on; in the meantime, here's another segment from December 6, 2019)

(also, for those wondering, just like December 2005, the CNF Christmas logo had different colors on each side; one side was green, the other was red)

(that's why some of these Christmas segments have a red logo and others have a green logo)

[stormcellarmag]

Storm Cellar #11.1 published!

It’s pub day, today, and we’re so excited to share with you our latest, a bit late but arriving in its own time! Big love to all who contributed, and — Reader — you’re gonna love this one! Get it in glorious print or fabulous ebook editions. CONTENTS: Force Majeure Flash Contest winners: 1st prize – Tessa Swackhammer, 2nd prize – Mike Yunxuan Li, 2nd prize – Julian Mithra, honorable mention –…

[academyoftheheartandmind]

Letters

By George Michael Brown The year was 1988. My mother had passed away the previous December, my father twenty-seven years before that. I was cleaning out their house, getting it ready to sell; the house I grew up in. I was removing items out of a small room in the basement, hidden behind the furnace, about the size of a walk-in closet. The room contained the incinerator and water heater on one…

[zukkaoru]

My ninth grade English teacher walks us through the prologue of Romeo & Juliet, explaining how it serves as a synopsis of the play, and how it spoils the ending. Here are our characters, here is where they live, here is why their love is forbidden. You will spend the next two hours learning to love them only for their blood to spill across the stage. This is the only ending they were ever meant for.

There is no universe in which Romeo & Juliet can survive.

jujutsu kaisen, gege akutami || a collection of tragedies, zukkaoru (march 15, 2023)

[id in alt text]

[lalobalives]

The FREE Writing Experimental Essays Series March Class: What is Flash Creative Nonfiction?

The FREE Writing Experimental Essays Series March Class: What is Flash Creative Nonfiction?

When: March 17th, 7-9pm ESTWhere: Online, via ZoomHow to register: Send an email with “Writing Experimental Essays March Class” in the subject line to writingourlivesworkshop@gmail.com Many of us were taught to write personal essays in the traditional way, where the events happen chronologically and we tell one story in a straight-forward way. This is not the way I tell stories.  The people I…

[puckthebettafish]

Writer, book of surreal poems with beta now and a few publishers, just in case. Title is Watering Can. I’m @fishclamor elsewhere. My fabulous substack is fishclamor.Substack.com for short 1-3 minute reads of my very shortest stories and poems. Some hilarious. Some serious. Check it out if you like! I don’t know how to do Tumblr so please forgive any faux pas.

[thehorrortree]

Submission Window: December 21st to January 21st, 2024 Payment: $50 Theme: Stories about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection. At Astrolabe, we’re looking for work about how we seek out, discover, and grasp onto connection. Into the woods. Across a line. Beneath the ocean. Along a seam. Into the branches of an alternate present or the crevasse of an alternate future. Across the rifts between one another. And then, once we find one other, the myths we make. We’re excited to see as many interpretations of this broad theme as there are stars in the night sky. We’re open to work of all genres, with a particular fondness for anything that moves beyond realism in form or content or spirit. Read about Astrolabe for details on our mission and what we’re doing with the Universe. The details Astrolabe is open for submissions year-round. We pay a $50 honorarium upon publication of one or more pieces from your submission. To help fund those payments, we alternate between free and paid submission periods throughout the year. Our free periods begin the day we publish new work—on the spring equinox, summer solstice, autumnal equinox, and winter solstice—and stay open for a month. Some additional details: We currently accept three types of work: fiction, creative nonfiction, and photography & art. See below for genre-specific instructions. We’re not a market for lineated poetry at the moment. We do accept simultaneous submissions, but please let us know if your work was accepted for publication elsewhere—we’ll be thrilled for your good news! No multiple submissions—and if we don’t accept your work, please wait until our next submission period before trying again unless we specifically ask for more work. We consider only unpublished work. We ask for first North American serial rights and non-exclusive print/anthology rights. All copyrights remain yours. Read more about the rights we ask for. Fiction & creative nonfiction Send us one piece no more than 3,000 words .doc, .docx, or .pdf format. If submitting flash, send up to three pieces of no more than 1,000 words each. We’ll happily consider fiction and CNF in all prose forms—prose poetry, micro, flash, and beyond—but we’re not considering lineated poetry at the moment. Photography & art Send us up to five pieces in .jpg, .png, .gif, or .pdf format. If your artwork doesn’t work in one of those formats—for example, if you’ve built something dynamic or interactive—send a link to where we can view it online, or just ask! Time to submit! We are currently open for free submissions until Sunday, October 22nd, 2023! Send your submission to editors@astrolabe.ooo with the following subject line, replacing the parts in green:Submission: Your Name, “Title”Include a short cover letter, bio, and your work as an attachment(s).We welcome pen names, author names, or pseudonyms. No need to include your legal name, physical address, phone number, or other personal information with your submission—the name you publish under and your email address is enough! We’ll get back to you within three months—if we take longer, it typically means we’re seriously considering your work, but you can always feel free to query us: editors@astrolabe.ooo. We’re strong believers that Wednesday is the least painful day of the week to send (or receive) a rejection. Track your submissions on Duotrope, Chill Subs, or The Submission Grinder! Your rights Astrolabe asks for first North American serial rights (FNASR) to your work, which ensures that we’re the first place this work appears. Once your work is published on Astrolabe, all electronic and print rights revert back to you—you can republish the piece as you see fit. We also ask for non-exclusive anthology and print rights. This allows us to use your work in a possible future anthology, but doesn’t prevent you from pursuing other https://horrortree.com/wp-admin/post.php?post=636299&action=edit#edit_timestampanthology or print opportunities in the meantime.

The copyright to your work remains yours at all times. Questions? Email us at editors@astrolabe.ooo. Via: Astrolabe.

[imreallyfredweasley]

206.

Two hundred and six pounds of silky, black, Great Dane. Stocky muscles lift, as giant paws step slowly off the pillow. 

Two hundred and six pounds of dead weight drop to the ground in that familiar way. 

Henry writhes, sliding around the living room floor as he lays in his own vomit and urine, foamy mucous cakes the side of his face. 

He whines constantly, the most heartbreaking sound, accompanied by that smell we’ll never not recognize.

 Two hundred and six seconds until it’s over, and I watch as Henry regains control of his body and mind. 

Two hundred and six seconds before I watch the light return to his eyes.

[jackielutzke]

Fine

At the gym when I looked up from the bike I was furiously pedaling a woman was on the ground, prone, in the aisle. A staff person knelt beside her. When the EMTs arrived she insisted on standing up, on walking. “I’m fine. Let me go.” She stumbled in front of the bike where I had been pedaling but less furiously, trying not to watch but aware. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” Clearly not fine but claiming it, trying to make it true.

Clearly not fine. She finally agreed to sit down.

Clearly not fine. I stopped pedaling.

[pascalepalaces]

"That Part Where He Straightens the Cross" in The Daily Drunk's Wikerpedia Anthology:

after The Wicker Man (1973) That was me, fifteen; the cross on my nightstand moved every night, and if it neared a Satanic sign, I’d read prayers to Mary’s statue to lull myself. From the window across from mine, the neighbours could have also watched, through the sliver underneath my curtains. When they smiled at me, that could have been what they were thinking. Like that, they made me masturbate in the closet.

I still thought about the crack between the door and the wall. A hyper-sensitive telescope could theoretically penetrate that, and the window first. I was never alone, without the ghost of my shame. Strangers were always touching me, touching me, always through the walls—and I would always keep going, keep pleasuring, keep burning up under their watch.