Management: Aidan's Fiction Selections

The last half-year, I have posted my writings on Friday as part of the #fridayflash community that J.M. Strother established and helps to maintain. It's a great community of writers and part of the experience is posting your own writing but it's also providing feedback to some of the other writers within the community.

I recently started keeping track of my three favorite flashes from the week and tried to post these in a single 140 character twitter post. I often had to get creative about the titles. This week, I discovered that bit.ly had added a new feature called bundles and this seemed like it would fit my fiction selections well.

The aim of the fiction selections is to identify a couple works that I enjoyed over the week. In particular, I'm including my three favorite flashes from #fridayflash but I retain the rights to add other free fiction I find on the web to my list. I decided to start doing this based on a comment I ran across one of the writing sites about reading slush piles and although I don't read for a competition, I saw the value in trying to decide which out of several stories is your favorite. Unlike a slush pile, #fridayflash has a lot of good writers and so that makes my job difficult.

I don't read all of the #fridayflash stories (most weeks there are more than 80 of them), but I do try to read those in the genres that I write (fantasy, magical realism, science fiction, and steam punk). The stories that I pick speak to me in some way, whether that's a character that stands out or a premise that I enjoyed. By only picking three, I'm leaving out many good stories (favorites for some other people), but it means that those stories that I do pick should be proud that I really enjoyed their story.

You can find this week's selection here.

P.S. I'm trying a new theme after Lara commented that she finds the black background more difficult to read and after reading some of the comments about the amateurish look of a certain publisher who recently purchased a certain magazine and has a dark background as their website's homepage. Let me know if you don't find this easy to read.

P.P.S. Don't expect to see too many management posts. My focus is still on getting published and that means writing short stories and novels and I measure my word count to see how well I'm doing (80,000 words since mid-September, not necessarily that much compared to nanowrimo participants) and blog posts don't count towards my totals.