Dodo Au Go-Go

There was a Twitter hashtag which did the rounds recently: #tweetjustyourvoice. The idea was to use record an audio of your voice with a visual that didn’t include your face, and then post it onto Twitter so that your communities of tweeps (Twitter folk) get to hear how you sound. I would have probably continued on my merry way, happily ignorant of all things connected to this hashtag, except that it got embraced with gusto by the FridayPhrases community , with a certain FridayPhrases host (the very persuasive @AdeleSGray ) inviting me to take part. If ever there was a hashtag designed to wallop me well out of my comfort zone, it was this one. Why? Thank you for asking. There are several reasons.

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!

One of the joys of playing FridayPhrases is when I fall in love with the little idea/image/mood composed for an  #FP micro-fiction  so much that I can't let it go straight away and I end up playing with it for ju-u-u-st a little bit longer. Sometimes, it escapes my head and ends up on paper as a piece of flash fiction.

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.

This story was born out of a piece of FridayPhrases micro-fiction on the theme of "Only human". (I love FridayPhrases and have gushed about it at length here ). This was the micro-fic that I initially came up with on Twitter:  "Frankenstein,Dracula & TheMummy glared at the Bouncer who said "Only humans." He got a philosophical lecture abt being human & a thump." This image tickled me enough that

In 2014, Twitter came alive for me when I discovered word prompt games to inspire fiction, micro-fiction, micro-poetry, fun, and Twitter communities of like-minded creatives. (I wrote about this earlier this year). Now, as 2014 comes to an end, I wanted to collect all my best pieces in one place, starting with my favourite compositions for FridayPhrases (known on Twitter by its short-hand hash-tag, #FP).

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. 

The following little story came to me while driving home one night on a dark road lit up in silver by a half-moon.  I suddenly had a fanciful little image of a car smilingly gobbling up a crescent-shaped sliver of moon-flake which helped its headlights shine brighter.  Such an image wouldn't normally find a home outside my head, but