Author Archives: Jude

BFFA Anthology, Volume 8 -The Weather Where You Are

We’re very excited that the eighth BFFA anthology of stories by winners, shortlisted and longlisted writers from the three 2023 Awards is back from the printers. The title, ‘The Weather Where You Are’ is the title of a story by William Davidson, a piece shortlisted in the February 2023 Award and it is the final story in the anthology. Big thanks to William for letting us use it. William also won first prize in the June Award for ‘Remembered Yellow’, the second story in the book. We love this title for its many resonances. The cover, which we also love, is designed by John at Ad Hoc Fiction and uses an image from an 1870s weather map showing a storm. Very fitting currently, when storms have been sweeping across many countries in recent weeks. We hope the authors will share pictures of the weather where they are, on social media, when they receive their books. It will be so interesting to see what is happening around the world.

Contributor copies have been posted to most authors and should be arriving soon in the UK. We hope they won’t take long to reach authors in other countries, which include USA, Ireland, France, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Taiwan, Spain, India, Italy.

There are 134 stories of 300 words or less in the book. It will be published on our bookshop at Ad Hoc Fiction shortly and on Amazon in paperback soon afterwards. Time to buy and read and get inspiration for our first Award of 2024, judged by Susmita Bhattacharya which closes in just over one month (February 4th). All 50 longlisted authors from this Award and the two others in 2024 will be offered publication in our ninth volume of stories, out at the end of the year or early 2025.

Thank you to everyone who entered in 2023 and supprted our ventures We received 3345 entries from 45 different countries. Looking forward to many more wonderful stories this year.

Ad Hoc Fiction 2023 Book News

Lots of great news for our short-short fiction press, Ad Hoc Fiction in 2023. Thanks to everyone worldwide who has bought any of our books. We love championing the short short form! First, for the third year running, Ad Hoc Fiction was a regional finalist (South West) in the small publisher category of the British Book Awards.

This news in February, was followed in the summer with the news that both David Swann and Tim Craig were shortlisted in The Rubery Award, Dave for Season of Bright Sorrow his 2021 Novella in Flash (which was the first prize winner in our Novella in Flash Award of that year and Tim for his 2022 collection, Now You See Him. In July we heard the wonderful news that Season of Bright Sorrow won the short story category and then the overall Rubery Book of the Year, for which Dave won £2000 (shared with the fantastic illustrator Sam Hubbard and a plaque)

Also, in the summer we learned that Now You See Him was longlisted (one of only ten short story collections) for the prestigious Edge Hill Prize for short fiction. Many congratulations to both David and Tim.
Now You See Him was also shortlisted in the Saboteur Awards along with several other of our Ad Hoc Fictio pubocations. We’ve listed them all in a post and thank you to everyone who nominated our books and activities and voted for them We’ve FIVE categories short-listed in Saboteur Awards, 2023!

Our other Award winning author this year is Michael Loveday. His guidebook Unlocking the Novella in Flash, published in 2022, has won mutiple awards this year.We are so pleased this excellent guidebook has received so many accolades! Many congratulations to Michael. So well deserved! Read all about his different writing services here.

Ad Hoc Fiction has published two other brilliant guide books this year. Haibun: A Writer’s Guide edited by Roberta Beary, Lew Watts and Rich Youmanns, which has already been hailed as the definitive guide on the subject and 51 and a half Games and Prompts for Writers by Vanessa Gebbie, which is now included in Chester University library as a reource for writers and has been recommended in the U3A national newsletter in the UK as a resource for writers. Rather late, but worth waiting for, we published three novellas in flash from the 2022 Novella in Flash Awards. In June, The Twisted Wheel, a runner up in the awards by David Swann, a highly commended novella, Essence by Christopher M Drew and Summer 1969, a shortlisted novella, by Sheree Shatsky. We’ve also published three more exciting novellas in flash The Learning Curve by Jan Kaneen, winner of the 2023 NIF Award, Prodigal by award runnner up Anna M Wang and The Top Road, award runner up by Fiona McKay which were the winners of the 2023 NIF competition. All these books were launched at the 2023 Flash fiction Festival in July.

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The Bath Flash Fiction Award anthology for 2022 Dandelion Years was published right at the beginning of thre year together with Flash fiction Festival Volume 5 (pictured in our gallery here). They were launched in Bath in March with cake and wine.
Our 2023 BFFA anthology will be back from the printers next week (cover reveal then) together with the next Flash Fiction Festival Anthology in the rainbow series (indigo this time). They will be posted to all contributors immediately and there’s a launch date in Bath (17th February) and a launch online to be confirmed soon.

Buy all these books from adhocfiction.com and from Amazon in paperback

Novella-in-Flash Award: reading notes by judge, John Brantingham

We’re very pleased to be able to announce, before the end of 2023, the short list of ten novellas in flash, selected by our judge, John Brantingham for our 2024 Bath Novella-in-Flash Award. It’s the eighth yearly Award we have run and during that time our small press publisher Ad Hoc Fiction have published over 40 novellas-in-flash. Thanks very much to John for his close reading of this year’s longlisted novellas in flash and for his brief essay below about his experience. We agree that all twenty five were excellent examples of the form and we hope that they will all find good homes in the expanding market for this form of writing. John will be choosing a winner and two runners up by early January 2024 and those three will be published by Ad Hoc Fiction in the New Year.

John writes: “It has been a pleasure to read the novellas-in-flash in the long list. I love the form. It can be powerful and heartbreaking, and all of these writers are using it to its full effect. Last year, when I judged the contest, I found that most of the work on the long list was deserving of publication. I had the same reaction this year.

What I find so inspiring about this work is the sincerity of it. These writers are writing with emotional complexity and compassion. Their work is often heartbreaking, often funny, and always human. It is the kind of work that ennobles the reader. For me, this is the greatest thing that fiction can do, and the novella-in-flash does so by stripping away the excess and artifice that be found in other long forms. These writers have gotten to the essence of their stories and characters, and I found myself lingering and rereading more than I should have.

The novellas-in-flash on the short list have stayed with me. I work about an hour away from where I live. I would read these books before I left home, and all ten of these works stayed with me as I drove through the rolling hills of Upstate New York. I found myself remembering the characters and feeling for them when they were hurting, laughing about their absurdities, or daydreaming about their settings in parts of the world I have never seen, but they described so clearly that I knew them.

There is a need for more publishers of novellas-in-flash. Of course, not all ten of these collections will be published as a result of this contest. That’s the nature of contests. I do wish, however, that other people like me who love the form could have the chance to read them. They are rich and beautiful. They all have the potential to change the way we understand the world we live in.”

We look forward to hearing about the first prize and two runners up in early January. Best wishes to all writers.

Jude
December 19th 2023.

“

Short list Novella-in- Flash Award, 2024

Congratulations to the ten authors who have made the short list for the 2024 Novella-in-Flash Award selected by our judge, John Brantingham. (Final results in early January, 2024).

Winners are yet to be announced, so while it is fine to share that you are on the short list, please do not identify yourself with your particular work until results are out. Thanks.

Novella-in-Flash 2024 Award Short List
Title	Author
Cups of Tea at the End of the World	tba
Hereafter	tba
Marilyn’s Ghost	tba
Nine Inches of Rain	tba
Nose Ornaments	tba
Outside Nazareth	tba
Reverse Echo	tba
Skin	tba
The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face	tba
The Screaming Meemies	tba

Susmita Bhattacharya, judge for 26th Award, Feb 2024

Susmita Bhattacharya is an Indian-born British writer. Her novel, The Normal State of Mind, was published in 2015 by Parthian (UK) and Bee Books (India) in 2016 and was long listed for the Words to Screen Prize, Mumbai Association of Moving Images (MAMI) Film Festival in 2018. Her collection of short stories, Table Manners, was published by Dahlia Publishing in 2018 and won The Saboteur Prize for the Best Short Story Collection in 2019. She teaches contemporary fiction at Winchester University. She was Writer-in-Residence at Word Factory in 2021. She is a regular workshop presenter at the Flash Fiction Festivals UK. She lives in Winchester.

Thank you for agreeing to judge our 26th award that closes in February 2024.
You write novels, short stories, poetry and flash fiction. Do you find in your writing that you switch easily from one form of writing to another?

Flash Fiction Festival!

What do you like about writing flash?

I love flash for the immediacy, the sense of urgency in a story. It’s punchy and experimental, and although it could be even 100 words long, it’s no easy feat to create a narrative in those many words which has a plot, character development, emotions, conflict and a punchy that often leaves the reader breathless. It’s a great challenge and to achieve a successful flash fiction requires great skill. I love the flash community as well. Most flash fiction writers are very supportive and enjoy being part of the community without being to competitive. There’s a lot of encouragement to keep writing flash, and lots of events that help this community to grow.

Recently, some of your short stories were broad cast on BBC radio. Was that under a special theme and is there still a link to listen to them?

Table Manners

listen to it here.

You are an associate lecturer in Creative Writing in Winchester and have taught workshops and courses in numerous places, both for adults and young people. What upcoming events are you involved in?

You have been a professional writer since 2005. Can you tell us some of the highlights of your career so far?

But the true highlights that I will hold dear to me are the little things: readers appreciating my work, readers reaching out to me to let me know my words have moved them. For example, finding someone reading my novel in a hospital waiting room was a highlight! A terminally ill friend of my husband’s parking his car to ring him, to let him know he’d just listened to my radio essay about cancer and how much that had resonated with him that meant so much to me. A Year 2 child in my children’s school where I used to work as a dinner lady would stop me on the way to lunch hall to give me ideas for my next book. (They’d been shocked when I had visited their class to talk about writing and shown them my book! They had said, you’re our Dinner Lady. And I had said, Dinner Ladies can do loads of other things outside of the lunch hour!) My daughter forgetting her reading book in secondary school, and her teacher fishing out a book from her bag to give her to read. ‘It’s your mother’s book,’ the teacher said. ‘Have you read it?’ ‘No,’ said my daughter, probably embarrassed at all the attention she would now get. Then all her classmates googled me, and she came home, saying, ‘mum, you’re a celebrity! Google recognizes you as a writer!’ That made me chuckle! Being invited to Cardiff University to talk to MA students about my writing journey has always been special. It’s always a ‘this is where it started, this is how it’s going’ experience! These are some highlights I will remember fondly and forever!

Finally, as our judge, can you say what sort of story would stand out as a winner for you?

For me, a flash fiction should immerse me in the story. It should feel immediate and also layered with meaning. It should leave something for the reader to work out, or have a moment of epiphany at the end. It could be a story about a theme without mentioning the theme. Think about Hermit Crab style or other ways of approaching a story. The story should make me wake up in the middle of night, still worrying about the characters, or trying to work out how they could work out the stuff they’ve been put through. A standout story would involve me as a reader, and make me care intensely for the character/s. In cricketing lingo, a story should not target the reader head on, give me a good googly ball – a sudden spin that will get you if, as a reader, you’re not ready for it!

Q & A with October 1st prize winner, Dawn Tasaka Steffler

We are delighted to post a Q & A with the October first prize winner, Dawn Taska Steffler from the USA. Dawn sent us some great pictures to go with her answers. A view from her sister’s backyard in Hawaii, her pets Rascal the dog, Momo the cat and Coco the chicken. and an extraodinary photo of her at The Broad in Los Angeles, which looks like she is a giant’s house! Be sure to read all the interview for inspiration and to get to the end and Dawn’s great prompt for writers who might want to enter our next Award. Dawn uses, as inspiration, a very powerful excerpt from a Martin Luther King text.

The Early bird discounts for the February Award, end on Sunday December 17th and the competition deadline is Sunday February 4th, 2024. Our Judge is novelist, short story and flash fiction writer Susmita Bhattacharya from the UK. Interview with Susmita coming very soon.

Q and A with Dawn Tasaka Steffler

judged by Sara Hills.

Détente

online Flash Fiction Festival Day

Read in Full

Our Best Small Fictions and Pushcart Prize Nominations 2024

we always nominate from our yearly winners in the three Awards for Best Small Fictions and the Pushcard Prize each year We are not able to nominate for Best Microfictions as they do not accept stories that will be in print as well as on our website.

For Best Small Fictions, we are allowed to nominate five stories. It is our pleasure to nominate the three 2023 first prize winners: ‘Market Forces’ by Louie Fooks, ‘Remembered Yellow’ by William Davidson and Detente by Dawn Taska Steffler. The other nominations are second prize winning stories ‘Butterfly Effect’ by Mairead Robinson and ‘Failure to Thrive’ by Sara Hills.

For the Pushcart Prize, we can select six stories and are delighted to nominate:
Second Prize winner ‘Walking to Wollongong‘ by Nikki Crutchley, ‘To All the Copies of Us’ third prize winner by Noemi Sheiring Olah, third prize winner,‘Lakota Widow‘ by Kevin Burns, third prize winner, ‘Murmuration’ third prize winner by Sally Jubb, highly commended ‘Train to the Last Iceberg‘ by Autumn Bettinger and highly commended ‘Diamonds in the Earth’ by James Montgomery.

They are all wonderful stories and best wishes to everyone going forward!

Novella-in-Flash Longlist, 2024

Congratulations to all the authors who have made our Award long list for the 2024 Award (Final results in January, 2024) and huge thanks to all who entered.

Author names are yet to be announced, so while it is fine to share that you are on the long list, we do ask that you do not identify yourself with your particular work at this stage.

Novella-in-Flash 2024 Award Long List
Title	Author
After the Fireworks	tba
A Man with No Plan	tba
Bachelor Girls and Free Women	tba
Cups of Tea at the End of the World	tba
Ephemera	tba
Everyone’s afraid of something	tba
Foxy and Family	tba
Handoffs	tba
Hereafter	tba
Maybe Tuesday	tba
Marilyn’s Ghost	tba
Nine Inches of Rain	tba
Nose Ornaments	tba
Outside Nazereth	tba
Reverse Echo	tba
Skin	tba
Spin of the Triangle	tba
Spring of Ash and Sunflowers	tba
The Butterfly House	tba
The Gathering	tba
The Graffiti Artist	tba
The Holy Track	tba
the Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face	tba
The Screaming Meemies	tba
The Sinking of Mrs Flanders	tba

Dawn Tasaka Steffler October 2023 First Prize

Détente

by Dawn Steffler

Because the internet said, children who lose a parent to suicide are more likely to die from suicide. Because for Tyler’s fourteenth birthday, I took him to Disneyland and thought we were having a good day, until his eyes brimmed with tears while we were in line and he mumbled, “I’m sorry, Mom — I don’t think I want to be here anymore.” And I knew he wasn’t talking about Space Mountain. Because my therapist said, “I know you’re angry. But you need to hold space for Tyler to grieve.” And I remember thinking, does no one give a fuck about me?

My husband hovers. I hear songs on the radio that croon “I’m sorry”, or I’ll see a heart-shaped cloud, or the Mexican place has a new banner, “Life is hard, tacos help.” I always ignore him. But two hours ago, Tyler barged into my bedroom, he’s receiving an award at tonight’s Senior Ceremony and his dress slacks are too short. I wanted to say, You’re just like your Dad, always leaving stuff to the last minute! But I didn’t. I said, “Would you like to look in your Dad’s closet?” And Tyler examined each hanger, the scrape of wire on wood, the rustle of fabric. He selected a navy suit and a pinstriped shirt still in the dry cleaner’s plastic sleeve. And when he emerged, I felt like I was looking at a ghost, except this ghost’s hair was shaggy and falling into its eyes.

And now I’m standing at the back of the gym. When Tyler accepts his commemorative plaque, the flyers on the table next to me flutter and ripple. And I whisper, “Fuck off.” I whisper, “Yes, he turned out amazing. No thanks to you.” I whisper, “Well, thank you. That means a lot.”

About the Author

Dawn Tasaka Steffler is a fiction writer from Hawaii who lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a Smokelong QuarterlyEmerging Writer Fellow, StoryStudio Chicago StoryBoard Fellow, and Best of the Net nominee. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Many Nice Donkeys, Milk Candy Review, Flash Frog, Pithead Chapel, Stanchion, Ghost Parachute, and others. She truly does believe tacos make life better. Find her on Instagram, Twitter and Bluesky @DawnSteffler and at www.dawntasakasteffler.com

Mairead Robinson October 2023 Second Prize

Butterfly Effect

by Mairead Robinson

That night you flipped out, drunk on vodka you found in your brother’s room as you rummaged for weed, you didn’t know that your best friend, too numb, wouldn’t speak for three days, and as you flipped, alone and raging, you didn’t know your teachers, on hearing the news, would rolodex their heads for anything they might have ever said, and you didn’t know as you emptied the bathroom cabinet for something to be enough, that your neighbour would stare at the fence, recalling a six-year-old on the trampoline, pigtails lifting into twin smiles as you bounced up down, up down, and you didn’t know as you smashed your own face in the mirrored doors, the bath filling dreadfully behind you, that your mother would say you were everything, just everything to her, and as you stepped half-dressed into tepid water, you didn’t know that the boy you slept with after a party, the one who bragged to his friends, would never again hold anyone close, and your mother’s boyfriend, who said you were all grown up, before he slunk from your candy-striped sheets, your pop-star posters, would hold your mother up at the funeral, eyes hard-glazed, like a daughter to me, he’ll say, lies the only truth on his face, and you didn’t know, as you gripped a glass shard without thinking, felt such calm sluicing through, that your brother would find you and be too afraid to know what to do; he’ll turn off the tap, towel-mop the tiles; soft white soaking up pink, and you didn’t know, when you flipped into that grey blur, that you’d be buried in the pale lilac chiffon you wore to your prom, cocooned in a casket painted by your cousin with poppies and vines and big yellow swallowtails fluttering through leaves.

About the Author

Mairead Robinson writes and teaches in the South West, UK. Her work has appeared in Ellipsis Zine, Crow and Cross Keys, The Molotov Cocktail (Flash Monster 2023), Free Flash Fiction, Full House Literary, Voidspace, and in various anthologies too. She is supposed to be working on a novel, but has become hopelessly addicted to Flash Fiction. She tweets @Judasspoon and skeets @maireadwrites.bsky.social