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Bath Flash Fiction Hot Spots

The Almost Annual Report

Bath Flash Fiction Award was set up the beginning of February 2015. By October 2015, we’d received 1000 entries, longlisted, shortlisted, judged – courtesy of Annemarie Neary, published and paid our winners. In the meantime, April 2015 saw us create and launch Ad Hoc Fiction.

By the time our second award closes on February 14th 2016, we’ll be 1 year and 3 days old. Across our Bath Flash Fiction and Ad Hoc Fiction sites we’ll have had around 172000 page views, 46000 unique visitors and 7000+ fictions submitted.

For those crunching numbers and getting jittery about the chances of winning Bath Flash, don’t worry. Because it’s free, easy to enter and publishes weekly, the vast majority of submissions go to Ad Hoc Fiction. When the four month submission window closes on Bath Flash, we’re guessing the award will have seen somewhere between 200 and 400 entries. Happily, as with our first run, writers continue to support us with their work from around the world – thank you.

With longlist readers and our judge Tania Hershman primed and ready to roll, all we need to complete our first year is your finest creations in 300 words or less. And remember, all submissions will be considered for publication in our forthcoming anthology.

New Year Updates

BathFlash Thank you to everyone who contributed to the three Charity Editions of our micro fiction project Ad Hoc Fiction. Your donations made £47, we topped it up to £50, and sent it to We Stand Together, this year’s Guardian and Observer newspapers’ charity appeal in support of refugees.

We’re going to continue trialling an optional £1 contribution to Ad Hoc Fiction until the Summer. With all the takings going to each weekly winner, our thinking is simple: The more people contribute, the bigger the prize. We won’t be taking a penny. To date, winners have been receiving around £10 along with their usual free entry to Bath Flash Fiction Award. Which brings us rather neatly on to…

This weekend, there will be just four weeks left until we close Bath Flash Fiction Award on February 14th. Why not enter now before the rush and save money by sending in two entries for £15 or three for £18? Our judge, Tania Hershman is selecting from a 50 long short list.

And don’t forget our other project coming later this year – a print and digital anthology of flash fictions selected from our Award entrants.

Ad Hoc Fiction Charity Editions

ad-hoc-charity-edition We’re trying out an optional £1 payment to read our newly designed Ad Hoc Fiction Weekly eBook. For the last three editions of this year, December 16th, December 23rd and December 30th, we’d particularly like you to add your £1 payment. Half the takings will go to the winning author and half will go to the Guardian and Observer newspaper “We Stand Together” appeal – raising money for six charities supporting refugees across the world: Red Cross, Migrant Offshore Aid Station, Doctors of the World, Refugee Council, City of Sanctuary and Asylum Seeker Resource Centre.

Your support will be appreciated.

Thank you.

Early Birds

We know all you writers love deadlines so we have given you two for this round of Bath Flash Fiction Award. Our Early Bird offer ends this Sunday, 13th December at midnight GMT. If you have some flashes ready to be launched into the world or want to write your last best flash fiction efforts for 2015 this weekend, enter them now and save some money. One entry for £7.50 and 2 for £12.00. Our three for £18 deal continues until we close on February 14th – yes, that’s only nine weeks and a few days left until we close.

It’s always better to send in more than one story to a contest if you can. Why? Because there’s the preference factor – some judges will like one better than the other. And that one may be your least favourite.

Our finalist judge, Tania Hershman, is reading a longer shortlist of fifty stories. So give yourself a good chance to make that list. And of course, you have the option of winning a free entry to the main contest by entering our weekly mini contest, Ad Hoc Fiction.

Tania Hershman
Our New Award Judge

Tania Hershman is the author of two short story collections: My Mother Was An Upright Piano: Fictions (Tangent Books, 2012), and The White Road and Other Stories (Salt, 2008) and co-author of Writing Short Stories: A Writers’ & Artists’ Companion (Bloomsbury, Dec 2014). Her début poetry chapbook is forthcoming in February 2016. Tania’s short stories and poetry have been widely published and broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She is curator of ShortStops (www.shortstops.info), celebrating short story activity across the UK & Ireland, a Royal Literary Fund fellow at Bristol University, and is studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

www.taniahershman.com

Welcome to Our New Award

First, we’d like to welcome our new judge, Tania Hershman. Regular contributors will notice that we’ve made a few other changes. In brief, here they are, and why we’ve made them.

We now have a closing date.
Many of you told us that you prefer to have a time scale to plan out your competition submissions through out the year, so we’ve introduced closing dates. Our intention is to keep the flash rolling by running three awards per year, each Award lasting four months. To encourage early submission to each Award – and hopefully avoid a last-minute closing date rush – submission fees are reduced for the first two months of each Award.

On Closing Our Inaugural Award

BathFlash The inaugural Bath Flash Fiction Award was launched in February 2015 and we’re delighted that Annemarie Neary agreed to be our first judge. She’s been very positive all the way through the contest, which has been a wonderful support – we didn’t know how long it would take to achieve the target of 1000 entries. In the end it’s been eight months from start to finish, roughly the same time as some other awards with known deadlines.

Running the Award without a deadline meant that we avoided the usual flood of entries that often arrive at the end of contests with a fixed-end date. We’ve been able to read the stories anonymously in batches as they arrived and select for a provisional long and short list as we went along. As a result, we’ve managed to announce the winners within a week of closure. Annemarie again helped with this. After receiving the shortlist, she spent a concentrated few days reading and rereading the stories to come up with three great winning flash fictions, two commended pieces and a very interesting and detailed report.

William Davidson
Inaugural Award First Prize

Radio Alarm

by William Davidson

Cape Wrath to Rattray Head including Orkney. Southerly, veering westerly later, 5 or 6. Showers. Good. Bad. Rattray Head to Berwick upon Tweed. Rat tray head. Berwick upon Tweed to Whitby. Southwest 4 or 5. Mainly fair. Good. Bad. Bad. Bad. Whitby to Gibraltar Point. Last night. Gibraltar Point to North Foreland. Last night. Westerly or southwesterly. Last night. Becoming variable. The rhubarb vodka. Mainly fair. The rhubarb vodka. Good. The rhubarb vodka. North Foreland to Selsey Bill. The bingo hall. Mainly fair. The widower from Thirsk. Good. The rhubarb vodka. Selsey Bill to Lyme Regis. The cathedral. Northwest backing southwest. The cathedral climb. Becoming variable 2 or 3 later. The cathedral police. Mainly fair. Good. Lyme Regis to Land’s End including the Isles of Scilly. The drag queens. Westerly 3 or 4. The stage. The rhubarb vodka. The stage. Rain later. The spotlight. The widower from Thirsk. Land’s End to St David’s Head including the Bristol Channel. The bicycle. Westerly. The bicycle ride. Showers. The naked bicycle ride. Good. St David’s Head to Great Orme Head including St George’s Channel. The racist. Great Orme Head to the Mull of Galloway. The punch. Becoming variable. The chase. Isle of Man. The vicarage. Lough Foyle to Carlingford Lough. The vicarage? Southwesterly. The vicarage. Then becoming variable. The vicar. Showers. The rhubarb vodka. Good. The widower from Thirsk. Mull of Galloway to Mull of Kintyre. The rhubarb vodka. Westerly or southwesterly. The vicar. Decreasing. The key. Showers. The church. Good. Mull of Kintyre to Ardnamurchan Point. The rhubarb vodka. Southwesterly. The rings. Showers. The widower from Thirsk. Ardnamurchan Point to Cape Wrath. The rhubarb vodka. Showers. The witnesses. Shetland Isles. The altar. Becoming cyclonic. The rhubarb vodka. Showers. The widower from Thirsk. Good. The husband. Occasionally poor. From Thirsk.

About the Author

William Davidson lives in York and works as an English tutor for deaf students. His stories have been published in Synaesthesia Magazine, Cheap Pop, The Puffin Review and in the anthology Solstice Shorts (Arachne Press). Lyme Regis was listed as highly regarded in the Brighton Prize 2015. He is in the W9 Writers group, led by Susan Elderkin. He tweets @WmDavidsonUK.

Eileen Merriman
Inaugural Award Second Prize

This Is How They Drown

by Eileen Merriman

Connie is lying on the sun-baked sand, her cousin Luke beside her. They are fifteen and feckless. Twenty metres and a lifetime away, Luke’s twelve-year old brother bobs over the swells.

The tide is turning.

Ferg is floating, the sky like cut glass and the sea soft and yielding. The sun beats on his upturned face, and the waves beat on the sand, but they sound very far away. That’s when he realises he’s drifting very fast, like he’s in a –

A wave breaks over his head.

Luke’s tongue flicks into Connie’s belly button. She tastes like salt and sunblock and girl. Connie whispers, ‘careful,’ because if their parents find out they’re dead. But then she wraps her fingers around the back of his neck, her tongue slipping into his mouth, and they forget about careful.

Ferg is floundering. The waves are so strong, and he goes under eyes wide water clear as glass and sharp in his lungs, and as his head breaks the surface he lifts his arm, help –

Connie pushes Luke’s hand away. Luke, frustrated, sits up, blinking into the metallic glare of the sun. That’s when he sees it, the flat area of sea between the breakers. ‘What’s wrong?’ Connie calls after him, but he’s already running.

When Luke reaches Ferg he is glassy-eyed, but his arms lock around Luke’s neck, and he’s an anchor dragging them down. Ferg, whose heart feels as if it’s exploding in his chest, takes one last gasp and the sea rushes in.

Luke’s larynx goes into spasm, so he can’t breathe in or out. But his oxygen-starved brain thinks it’s Connie’s arms around his neck, Connie’s honeyed breath in his air-locked lungs. And as the sequined water passes over their mirrored eyes his heart beats its last, forever in love.

About the Author

Eilleen Merriman Eileen Merriman’s work has been published in the Sunday Star Times (NZ), Takahe, Headland, Flash Frontiers, and Blue Fifth Review and is forthcoming in the 2015 Bath Short Story Anthology and F(r)iction. She was commended in the 2015 Bath Short Story Competition, was awarded third place in the 2014 Sunday Star Times Short Story Competition and has recently won the 2015 Flash Frontier Winter Writing Award. In 2015 she was awarded a mentorship through the New Zealand Society of Authors for work on her YA novel ‘Pieces of You’. She tweets @MerrimanEileen.

Mark Ralph-Bowman
Inaugural Award Third Prize

The Most Amazing

by Mark Ralph-Bowman

It goes dark at 11.43. I’d fixed the toilet. Flushed a whirlpool. Not completely dark. Like the Hollywood blue nighttime filter. I see Amy out there. Two doors down. All tits and brown eyes. In the street.

– What’s going on, Will? She asks when I rock up. Cool as Smithy.

– Like I know, man? I just flushed and. Well.

– You flushed the toilet?

– Yeah. I fixed it.

– Awesome.

She scratches at the pink nobble of a button on her blouse. Looking away into the midnight blue. Up where the library was. Kia dealership now. I’m wondering what she’s thinking. No. I’m wondering if she’s thinking. Like I do. Blokes. You know. Every three seconds.

– You play that game? She asks. When you was a kid? What would you do if you knew the world was ending?

– Oh, yeah.

Where’s this going I think.

– What did you say?

– Depended?

– On?

– If there was girls.

– And if there was?.

– We talking back then?

– Whenever.

I look up at the sky. Getting darker. No stars up there. But I can see just fine. Probably my eyes adjusting. They do. Fifteen minutes it takes.

– Whenever? She says. Then or now.

– Back then it woulda been I’d find the girl I never told and I’d tell her.

– What? What would you tell her?

– You’ve got the most amazing eyes.

– What if she didn’t have?

– You’ve got the most amazing eyes.

Her smile breaks out like a timelapse flower opening. Lips glossy as Ramiro pepper skins. The tiniest mole, all on its own at the end of the line of her eyebrow. A full stop.

About the Author

Mark has been involved in education and performance in Uganda, Nigeria and the UK, enabling writing and performing opportunities for people of all ages. He writes plays for both adults and young people, has a novel nearing completion and writes short stories. He is currently preparing a touring production of his play “With You Always”. He tweets @Emahbea.