News

Flash Fiction Festival Weekend, 12-14 July in Bristol UK. Booking Open!

A busy week! It’s the final weekend to enter our 26th Award judged by Susmita Bhattacharyya. The deadline is midnight GMT, Sunday 4th February. Results out on 29th Feburary. All fifty on the longlist will be offered publication in our eighth anthology. Copies posted worldwide.
Double and triple entries reduced. £1460 in prizes.

And for more excitement, booking for the packages at the seventh flash fiction festival we’ve sponsored, 12th -14th July, in Bristol UK is now open.

There are four different flash fiction festival booking options, two for a place with accommodation and meals, one for a place with meals but no accommodation and one for a place only. There are 29 fantastic workshops and panels by presenters from the UK the USA, Canada Germany, Italy, Cyprus and Ireland to choose from in seven different slots during Saturday and Sunday. And there are readings, book launches on Friday and Saturday nights, a book shop, a bar with karaoke and plenty of space to socialise in the beautiful grounds of Trinity College! On the flash fiction festival site, check out the gallery of pictures from 2023 to get a sense of the atmosphere Read in Full

share by email

Using Tarot to Inspire Flash: Anna M Wang

    Anna M Wang is a Bristol based author and librarian. Her novella in flash, Prodigal (runner up Bath Flash Fiction Novella in Flash Award 2023), is currently available through Ad Hoc fiction and Amazon. Her writing examines the introspective, the interpersonal, mental health, surrealism and femininity.

    She’s recently begun organising a community project on the subject of Tarot Cards, and is eager to showcase a variety of voices and styles. Read in Full

share by email

Eight BFFA Anthologies Published since 2016!

Two weeks to go until the deadline our 26th Award on Sunday February 4th. (Judge Susmita Bhattacharya) and the first chance to be offered pubication in our 2024, anthology, the ninth one in the series. Fifty longlisted authors are offered publication in each round of the award. Feb, June and October and then the book is compiled.

We’ve published nearly 900 stories since the first volume was published. Cover images and links to picture galleries of all eight anthologies are below with links to pictures of the books when they arrived with the authors, or to book launches and interviews.

Our eighth anthology from the 2023 Awards The Weather Where You Are is still on its way to some people and we’ll post a gallery up soon!

  • Vol One: To Carry Her Home, title story by Christopher Allen
  • Vol Two, The Lobsters Run Free, Title story by Anna Geary Meyer
  • Vol Three: Things Lost and Found by The Side of The Road, title story by Jo Gatford
  • Vol Four With One Eye on the Cows, title story by Annette Edwards-Hill
  • Vol five Restore to Factory Settings, title story by J A Keogh
  • Vol Six, Snow Crow, title story by Doug Ramspeck
  • Vol Seven Dandelion Years, title story by Joanki Ray
  • Vol Eight The Weather Where You Are, title story by William Davidson
  • This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    share by email

    25 BFFA 1st prize stories 2016-2023

    There’s just under three weeks left before Sunday February 4th, the deadline of our 25th Award judged by UK based writer, Susmita Bhattacharya, and I’m reposting a list I made a couple of years ago of all our first prize wins, linked to judge’s comments and author interviews and put into categories of subject matter and theme. There are four more first prize wins now. One other thing to consider if you read the stories — our Award word limit is 300 words but we welcome very short micros too. This might be of interest to those who recently subbed 100 word pieces for the Welkin prize. One of our first prize winners, Tying the Boats by Amanda 0’Callaghan from 2017 is just 180 words long. Read in Full

    share by email

    Novella in Flash 2024 Results

    Huge congratulations to the winners and highly commended writers in our 2024 Novella in Flash Award, selected by John Brantingham. Read their bios below.

    Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing, Hereafter the first prize novella by US based writer, Sarah Freligh and the runner-up novellas, Nose Ornaments by Sudha Balagopal from the US and Marilyn’s Ghost by Jo Withers,from Australia.

    Best wishes to our two highly commended authors, Jupiter Jones and Thomas McColl, and the shortlisted and longlisted writers for future publication of their novellas. And good luck to everyone who entered. It was a privilege to read your work. What a wonderful array of novellas!

    You can read John Brantingham’s comments on the three winners and the two highly commended in his judge’s report and his general comments in his report and also his reading notes from when the short list was announced. We really appreciate his careful work over the past few months.

    First prize winner:
    Hereafter by Sarah Freligh

    Sarah Freligh is the author of six books, including Sad Math, winner of the 2014 Moon City Press Poetry Prize and the 2015 Whirling Prize from the University of Indianapolis, and A Brief Natural History of Women, published in 2023 by Harbor Editions, and Dear You, Alien Buddha, August 2023. Recent work has appeared in the Cincinnati Review miCRo series, SmokeLong Quarterly, Sun Magazine, the Wigleaf 50, and in the anthologies New Micro: Exceptionally Short Fiction (Norton 2018), Best Microfiction (2019-22) and Best Small Fiction 2022. Among her awards are poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation.

    Runner-up
    Nose Ornaments by Sudha Balagopal

    Sudha Balagopal’s fiction straddles continents and cultures, blending thoughts and ideas from the east and the west. She is honored to have her writing in many fine journals including The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, CRAFT, The Maine Review and Bureau Dispatch. Her highly- commended novella-in-flash, Things I Can’t Tell Amma, was published by Ad Hoc fiction in 2021. She has stories included in Best Small Fictions, 2022 and 2023. When she’s not writing, she teaches yoga. Find her on Twitter @authorsudha or at www.sudhabalagopal.com

    Runner-up
    Marilyn’s Ghost by Jo Withers

    Jo Withers spent the first thirty-five years of her life in Northern England before moving to South Australia in 2008 where she now resides with her husband, children and a motley crew of elderly pets.She works in her local kindergarten and finds the children’s quirky comments are a constant source of inspiration for her ‘world off-kilter’ brand of fiction.Jo has previously won prizes at The Caterpillar, Reflex Press, FlashBack Fiction, Furious Fiction, Retreat West, Molotov Cocktail and SmokeLong. Her work has featured in Best Microfictions 2020 and Wigleaf Top 50 2021. She has also been nominated several times for a Pushcart Prize.

    Highly Commended
    Nine Inches of Rain by Jupiter Jones

    Jupiter Jones lives in Wales and writes short and flash fictions. She is the author of three novellas-in-flash, The Death and Life of Mrs Parker, Lovelace Flats, and Gull Shit Alley and Other Roads to Hell. Being a proper nerd with very little social life, she is currently working on a PhD on the role of (dis)connectivity in the novella-in-flash. https://jupiter-jones.com/
    @jupiterjonz

    Highly Commended
    The Man With the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face by Thomas McColl
    Thomas McColl lives in London and works as a Procedural Publisher at the House of Commons. He’s had two collections of poetry published – Being With Me Will Help You Learn (Listen Softly London Press, 2016) and Grenade Genie (Fly on the Wall Press, 2020) – and his short stories and poems have been published in magazines such as Fictive Dream, Bare Fiction, Here Comes Everyone and Smoke: A London Peculiar, and featured on BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM and TV’s London Live.

    share by email

    John Brantingham’s report on Novella in Flash 2024

    Thanks very much to John Brantingham for judging our 2024 Award, and for his encouraging general comments as well as the specific remarks about the winners listed below. John is a big fan of the novella in flash, having also written several himself and we absolutely agree that all these novellas should be out in the world.

    You can also read John’s previous comments on the longlist and short list and read more about the winners and commended below. As stated in our Award details, Ad Hoc Fiction is publishing the top three this year Hereafter,the first prize winner and the runners up, Nose Ornaments and Marilyn’s Ghost.

    John writes:

    I am thrilled with all of the novellas-in-flash in this year’s contest. Each of these had diverse subject matter, styles, and approaches to fiction writing, but I loved that each of them used the novella-in-flash form to help distill what they were saying about the world. In addition to this one unifying element, they also all dealt with those most powerful moments of the human experience. They dealt with issues like breaking with the past as one moves on into the future, how to negotiate life in a small town, grief and loss, thoughts of suicide, and the way society constructs and deconstructs fame.
    As with last year, I would encourage any of the writers whose work I read to find a publisher for their work. These were all interesting and innovative, and the decision for the final choice is to some degree subjective. I can say that I loved reading all of them. I would have bought them had they been on a shelf in a bookstore.

    Highly Commended
    The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face
    The Man with the Glass Blown Head and Brick Wall Face is a fascinating novella about a man who discusses the endless abuse and self-harm of toxic masculinity and staying closeted that leads to self-harm. This work contains an interesting intrusive narrator who not only presents the story but also provides commentary on what was happening and the greater meaning of it all in terms of how the main character views the world and is handled by the world. He still keeps us at a bit of a psychic distance, which is the perfect place to keep up because otherwise it would turn pedantic. It is not just a strong novella-in-flash, but the stand-alone stories have self-contained emotional catharses that are moving in their own right.

    Highly Commended
    Nine Inches of Rain
    Nine Inches of Rain is a historical novella-in-flash set in August of 1952 when a storm ravages a small town. Aside from any other considerations, the story of how a group of people deal with and live through natural chaos is compelling. The characters and their reactions are human and telling. However, Nine Inches of Rain uses the novella-in-flash form to explore what life in 1952 in the United Kingdom outside of London was like. It looks at the values and interpersonal relationships of the people in this world.

    Runner Up
    Nose Ornaments
    Nose Ornaments follows the lives of three generations of Indian women as they migrate from India to Arizona. It looks at the Indian diaspora during a time of quickly shifting norms for women, and each generation finds that it needs to break free from the traditions of the previous generation. By using multiple generations, the author is able to bring humanity not only to the women as they free themselves from social norms, but also to show how disconcerting it is for a person of the previous generation to watch as her daughter acts in a way that doesn’t make sense to the mother.

    Runner Up
    Marilyn’s Ghost
    Marilyn’s Ghost is a fictionalized account of the death and days following Marilyn Monroe’s death. It is a discussion not only of the characters in the story but also the social mores that surrounded the icon and our understanding of her. The shifting point-of-view helps us to understand who she was and how people projected their fantasies upon her. Just as important is a shifting style and approach to narrative. The author uses as many different ways of storytelling as possible in this short novella-in-flash. Each of them helps us to understand a different aspect of what the writer is suggesting about Monroe and our understanding of her.

    Winner
    Hereafter
    Hereafter is a powerful novella-in-flash about the nature of grief. A woman loses her child when he’s young. There is no one there for her and those people who should be part of her support system, mother and partner and others, are either missing from her life or so critical of it and her that she might as well be alone. So she has to find a way to live and survive without the help of others. Hereafter is also a discussion of what it is for a woman to grow and feel invisible in a culture obsessed with sexualizing youth. What stands out as one of its achievements of Hereafter is the way that the main character doesn’t experience grief in a linear fashion or predictably. Years later, she’ll be reminded of what she lost and will be drawn into the pain in unexpected ways depicting the way that grief functions in a realistic way.

    share by email

    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.

    share by email

    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.

    This slideshow requires JavaScript.

    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

    share by email

    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.

    share by email

    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

    share by email