Writing, writing, writing...

Back in the day, well, last century in the main, I read Stephen King novels, not religiously, interspersed with whatever else caught my attention, I like action, thrillers, mysteries, and SF and Fantasy versions of the same. King's works were part and parcel of pop culture, with many of them adapted to film, to varying degrees of success, stellar for "The Shawshank Redemption" to the likes of "Graveyard Shift", which I did see in the cinema!

Some of King's stories I enjoyed, some I really didn't like at all, and I would not describe myself, even my teenage voracious reading self, as a Stephen King fan; still, his personal story grabbed my attention as that teenage self contemplated writing a book.

King, at least as I remember it, which for this personal anecdote is what matters, suffered a great many rejections, throwing Carrie into the waste paper basket, only for his wife to rescue the manuscript and send it to another publisher, and this time someone picked it.

Another Star Author—more successful still who comes with a similar story of initial rejection is JK Rowling; in fact, I'm sure almost all writers who come to work without fame from another job already in play would have their version of this rite of passage.

I'm grateful to live in an age where authors can self-publish at little cost and gain varying degrees of success doing so, though perhaps not to the height of these luminaries of the publishing world, at least not yet.

King, as I remember, also said, back in the day, that an author ought to write a thousand words a day minimum, come what may.

Again, this is my recollection, but it is advice that I try to apply.

Writing my daily flash fiction means living this. The story ends up at around 600 words, but getting there is, more often than not, a longer road.

Besides the discipline of writing every day, flash fiction also engenders tightness, and to get to that, cutting back on the first draft/s is inevitable.

While I have the advantage of my dream journal as a starting point, giving me the core idea, the process of creating the story from a sometimes cryptic starting point can be challenging. Still, it also pushes me into genres I would not have otherwise tried.

Having tried them, my proclivity for action and adventure, comic book hokum, and Fantasy: Sword and Sorcery and SF remain, and my dreams don't let me down with many examples of these tropes, with time travel and alternate realities a recurring theme.

If you want to receive a daily flash fiction story the day before it is published on Telegram and X you can click - here - and join the mailing list.