News

February 2016 Award Long List

With huge thanks to every writer who entered our Award from all around the world.

Second Bath Flash Fiction Award Long List
Fiction Title	Author
All The Time In The World	Emily Devane
And The Sea Rolls On	Emily Devane
Are You Afraid Of The Dark?	Sarah-Clare Conlon
A widow with a bowl of wine and lipstick coming off	Nasim Marie Jafry
Backroads	Michael Wheaton
Billy	Clodagh O’Brien
Caterpillars	June Prunty
Cheese Sandwich	Emma Feasey
Claudia is in Love	Liz Cookman
Collecting Stones	Patrick Holloway
Empty	Bunmi Ogunsiji
First catch your hare	Sharon Telfer
Five Months	Charmaine Wilkerson
Guillotine	Matthew Fiorentino
Heart of Oak, Body of a Man	Kerry Hood
He Became Mr Maracas	Ruth Tamiatto
How To Find Contentment	Kit de Waal
I climb into a book	Shih-Li Kow
If We Could Dig To China	Amber Lee Dodd
Imminent	Ruth Tamiatto
Kong	Melissa Manning
Leo’s Song	Sherry Morris
Lorca’s Little Bird	Trisha Hanifin
Midnight in London	Jason Jackson
Mom Woke Us One Night	D.R.D. Bruton
My father, who ate a tree	KM Elkes
Natural Selection	Gayle Letherby
Nocturnal	Alex Reece Abbott
Not Crying Now	Sara Crowley
One two three, two two three	Jilna Shukla
Perhaps Rain, Later	Alex Coulton
Roderick Takes Control	Calum Normand
Roll and Curl	Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Shadowtrain	Peter Blair
Sniff The Rain	Nick Black
Static	Caitlin Stobie
Teacher	Keeley Mansfield
The Gift	Jeanette Lowe
The Last Taxi of the Year	Sarah Wallis
The love I feel in my belly	Joanna Matthews
The Motherbone	Jessica Franken
The Old Man and his Wife	Rupert Dastur
Thinking about Jessica	Scott Wilson
Unfaithful To The Land	Kit de Waal
Waking The House Of Feathers	Kerry Hood
What he said about the war	Samuel Dodson
When the In-laws Visit	Susan Kaberry
Words is words is words	Tess Adams
Worth the Having	Deb Tomkins
You Have So Many More Choices than Fight or Flight	Al Kratz

BathFlash

Guest Interview: Michelle Elvy

Michelle Elvy

Michelle Elvy is a writer, editor and manuscript assessor based in New Zealand’s Bay of Islands. Her poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and reviews have been published in numerous print and online journals. She lives on her 43’ sailboat with her husband and two daughters and is presently exploring the waters of East Africa. She edits at Flash Frontier: An Adventure in Short Fiction and Blue Five Notebook and is Assistant Editor, International, of the Best Small Fictions series, by Queens Ferry Press.
www.michelleelvy.com

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.