Dodo Au Go-Go

A little while ago, in early February, my favourite Twitter-based microfiction game ,  @FridayPhrases , generated the following  #FP  effort from me: Her suitor cuts her at the opera, blatant, cruel. She is publicly silent & slips a snake onto his coach. He likes games; she doesn't lose I quite liked it and thought there might be scope for a longer story sitting in between the words, waiting for the telling. But even better, the brilliant @HopeDenney2 quite liked it too. When we realised we both thought it could be developed into a longer story, we, of course, had to give it a go! So we did, and we each came up with very different interpretations. Hope's story is immediately below, and mine is further down the post. Enjoy!

I go on about this all the time : I'm a huge fan of the Twitter microfiction game run by @FridayPhrases , where the aim is to write stories on the optional theme in Twitter's 140 characters or less, using the hashtag, "#FP". Last year, I made a list of my favourite FPs out of all the ones I'd written in 2014. I'm doing the same again this year. As per last year, it's interesting to see the common threads throughout my year's FPs.

I read something years ago about Anais Nin being part of a community of writers (including Henry Miller) who were getting paid  $1 a page to write, shall we say, 'explicit' stories for an anonymous, wealthy collector. You can find out more about the story itself easily enough, but the thing that really struck me and stayed with me, was that Nin was part of a group of writers who hung out together, worked in a collective and were trying to make a living through writing, creating.  How, I always wondered, did these writers all find each other? I mean, I assume that they were all hanging out at the same cafés or salons  or gatherings all the time, but still... How did they go from crossing paths to having and sharing a writing community and culture?

How a piece of micro-fiction that had no right to be anything more, grew up to become a published piece of flash-fiction - with my reflections on the writing process along the way. I received some wonderful news in June. A flash-fiction story I submitted for a special edition of the SirensCall ezine was accepted, and was published at the end of June. Oh, all right, all right. Since you insist, the link to SirensCall ezine issue is here: http://www.sirenscallpublications.com/pdfs/SirensCallEZine_June2015.pdf The most amazing thing about this story is how it happened.

In a corner of the Twitterverse, there is a wondrous galaxy called Friday Phrases.  I stumbled onto it in the first half of 2014 and became quickly smitten. You see, Friday Phrases is all about micro-fiction - creating, doing, playing and celebrating it.