I have a suspicion. I think some of you have not been completely truthful with us–well truthful maybe but not truthful. We suspect, or maybe it’s just me, that a few (thousand) of you have occasionally placed the label “fiction” on your story because that’s pretty much half of the term “flash fiction”. We get that. And we have always gone by the rule “If the writer calls it fiction, it’s fiction.”
But we all know that’s not completely true. Truth is truth though. A great story is a wonderful thing regardless of whether it really happened or not; the truth at its core is the gem we’re looking for. So we want you to know we’re open.
We want you to feel freer, less constrained by labels. That’s why we’ve changed our wording ever so slightly. You might have noticed it with your eagle eye. You may now stop lying to us and start sending us those bombastic flash CNF narratives that the world needs (to know aren’t fiction). You may now start openly sending us those hybrid flash narratives–the ones that aren’t quite non-fiction (main character is a squid) but aren’t quite fiction (main character is 100% you).
In our Submittable queue we don’t plan at the moment to have different forms for fiction, non-fiction and hybrid stories. As always, we’ll make our decisions based on the quality of the writing. So send us your best.
But please don’t send us poetry. We haven’t lost our minds.
Much love,
Christopher
A SmokeLong Summer 24!