The 81 Words Challenge (+ my avatar!)

You may have gathered that I've not been highly motivated with my writing lately what with Covid-19 and lockdown and what-have-you. To illustrate how much time I've had on my hands, here is my avatar created during an idle few hours:

She's rather cute, don't you think. I've grown quite attached to her but it did make me realise that I needed to get back to writing and quickly. So a few days ago I did an online search for flash fiction submissions and came across a site that was asking for 81 word stories - precisely 81 words. I had an idea for a suitable piece of text and set about editing it down to 81 words. I love doing that sort of writing. It makes you really think about the usefulness of each word. It's surprising how many words can be cut without losing the meaning and at the same time making the content sharper.

One of the things that caught my eye about The 81 Words Challenge site was that the host, Christopher Fielden, was planning to gather stories from 1,000 different writers in order to break a world record. Sadly the Guinness World Record Office have declined to accept (you can read all his letters to them on the link in this paragraph) but he is determined to produce an anthology and all proceeds will go to The Arkbound Foundation, a charity that aims to widen access to literature and improve diversity within publishing. 

If you fancy having a go at writing an 81 word story then click on the link above and check out the guidelines. At the time of writing he needs another 128 stories to reach the 1000 mark. While you're there you might want to have a look at my contribution. It's called The Living Statue and it's somewhere near the bottom of the page with all the Stories from 801 to 900. 

Christopher's website is packed full of help with short story writing, lists of competitions and challenges that he is organising and he also has a list of other publications accepting submissions. You can find all this info at Christopher Fielden. He has certainly inspired me to get back to work and so I shall now wander off to my writing den, lick my virtual pencil and get scribbling. Bye for now...