Tim VanSant

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 50

May 122012

We had 68 stories in the Collector this week with 1 Debut. Please welcome Simon Towler to the community. The stories this week fall under 13 different genres, including one each in Crime, Noir, Romance, Urban Fantasy, and Western. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

I don’t remember the last time we had more than 60 stories two weeks in a row. May is shaping up to be a prolific month. Keep up the great work!

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 49

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May 052012

We had 61 stories in the Collector this week with 6 Debut stories from 5 authors. Please welcome H.W.Litchfield, DL Thurston, Elizabeth Myrddin, Steve McHugh, and Patrick Anderson Jr. to the community. The stories this week fall under 16 different genres, including one each in Action, Mystery, Paranormal, Romance, and Suspense. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

We are just a few weeks away from celebrating another anniversary of the #FridayFlash meme. I mention that now in case you want to plan something special to mark the occasion. (I wouldn’t say no to cake, for example. )

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 48

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Apr 282012

We had 58 stories in the Collector this week with 2 Debuts. Please welcome Fayne Riverdale and Wakefield Mahon to the community. The stories this week fall under 15 different genres, including one each in Crime, Experimental, Historical, Literary, Mystery, Non-Fiction, Romance, and Suspense. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

We have only three stories this week with an unspecified genre. I know how difficult it can be sometimes to decide what genre fits a story best. Many of us don’t think about genre when we write — it’s more of a marketing term than a writing term — and I confess I’ve entered stories as unspecified a time or two. But genre is something that may draw readers to your work. And we all want to draw in more readers, don’t we? Unspecified will remain a choice, but we hope you’ll consider whether your story might be better served if you specify a genre.

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 47

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Apr 212012

We had 55 stories in the Collector this week with 1 Debut. Please welcome Sasha to the community. The stories this week fall under 13 different genres, including one each in Action, Experimental, Paranormal, and Thriller. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

The length of flash fiction makes for good reading when you’re on the go. Do you read #FridayFlash on a mobile device such as a Kindle, Nook, iPad, or smartphone? Would you be interested in some sort of FFDO app? Let us know in the comments.

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 46

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Apr 142012

We had 52 stories in the Collector this week with 5 Debuts. Please welcome Jeffrey Hollar, Denis Doran, Jason Banks, Lena, and Mrs G to the community. The stories this week fall under 11 different genres including one each in Experimental, Magical Realism, Mystery, Paranormal, and Steampunk. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 45

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Apr 072012

We had 46 stories in the Collector this week with no Debuts. Some old friends that we haven’t seen for a while have entries this week. The stories this week fall under 11 different genres, including one each of Adventure, Cross-Genre, Historical, Literary, and Mystery. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

There has been lots of terrific news in our weekly News Flash reports compiled by Estrella Azul. Keep sharing all the great links to publications, book launches, contests, markets for flash fiction, new gigs, etc. with your community. Estrella has contact info at the bottom of each News Flash.

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 44

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Mar 312012

We had 43 stories in the Collector this week with 1 Debut. Please welcome Daragh Beirne to the community. The stories this week fall under 13 different genres including one each in Experimental, Mystery, Paranormal, and Romance. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

Make sure you check out our updated I Write #FridayFlash Badge page. And if you participate at all in our little weekly exercise, please consider putting a badge on your blog or personal website.

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

My Name is Friday. I Carry a Badge.

Community News, How-To, Tech 7 Responses »

Mar 292012

I Write #FridayFlash Badge You’ve probably seen this badge around as you visit sites reading #FridayFlash. When our editor, E. D. Johnson, instituted the program last summer it was always our intention to streamline the process. We’re making some steps in that direction. Today we are unveiling our new and improved I Write #FridayFlash Badge page. This page has two significant improvements over the old version: the list of authors is sortable and searchable and you can add yourself to the list.

Participating Authors

The list of participating authors is now in a table that you can sort by genre or author’s name just by clicking on the heading at the top of the column. Clicking again reverses the order. You can then shift-click another column heading to sort the results. And what I think is the best feature is the search function. Start to type a word in the search box and all the columns are dynamically filtered. So, for example, if you’re in the mood for something funny you could type humor in the search box and see only those authors who have that listed. Want to know who writes funny and scary? Just leave a space and enter another search term like horror and you’ll find there are a few authors in our community who list both.

As much as I love this improvement, it did come at a cost. On the old page, you could click the author’s name to go to their website. I’ve had a devil of a time trying to get that to work in the new format. I’ll keep working on it and plan to add that in later. In the meantime, if anyone has experience with jQuery Datatables on a WordPress site, I could use some technical assistance. BTW, we’re working on a similar table for listing #FridayFlash stories. We hope to have that ready later this year.

Add Your Name to the List

On the old page you had to leave a comment when you had the badge in place on your site and then E.D. or someone on our tech team had to edit our page to add you to the list. Now we have a form similar to the one we use for the Collector and you can add yourself. And, like the Collector, if you are a member here at FFDO I set it up to read your Name, Email address, and Website address from your profile to save you a few seconds filling in the form. There was a slight trade-off here too. The genres listed are the same as those on the Collector (except there’s no “Unspecified” category here, it’s just blank instead). I did recently add a few genres to the Collector to match some of the choices you made, but I didn’t add them all. It’s something of a balancing act to provide a comprehensive selection that is still manageable in size. We are, of course, open to suggestions for amending the list. Let us know in the comments how we can improve it.

If I made a mistake in transferring your information into the new table or if you want to change it for any reason (for example if you get a new web address or you want to change genres or the order of your genres) use the form to enter the new information. When I see a duplicate name, I’ll assume the new entry is correct and delete the old entry. (Only one listing will be provided for each author with up to three genres.) Also you should know that when I updated the list I looked for the badge displayed and linked correctly at the address listed. There were a couple sites that no longer exist and a few that apparently no longer display the badge, so I removed them from the list. If the link was not correct, I sent you an email requesting that you update your site. (Instructions are on the badge page. Let us know if you need technical assistance. The correct URL is http://fridayflash.org/press/badges/i-write-fridayflash-badge/)

Oh, and if you participate in #FridayFlash and have your own blog or website but you don’t have a badge yet, go get one now!

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 43

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Mar 242012

We had 54 stories in the Collector this week with 5 Debuts. Please welcome Natalie Bowers, Leigh Andrews, Elizabeth R.E., Lisa Lane, and Alex Tomlin to the community. The stories this week fall under 13 different genres; the most common this week are Slice of Life, Fantasy, and Horror. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

If you missed Jon’s post about the first anniversary of the FFDO site, you can still catch it here and add a comment if you like. We are soliciting ideas to make the site ever better, so put your two cents worth in. (And if we offer you a penny for your thoughts, why does it sound like we both lose money on the deal?) We’ll be updating the I Write #FridayFlash Badge page next week. Look for details on Thursday.

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »

The #FridayFlash Report – Vol 3 Number 42

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Mar 172012

We had 52 stories in the Collector this week with 3 Debuts. Please welcome Shan Jeniah Burton, Stu, and Chris Cruz to the community. The stories this week fall under 15 different genres; the most common this week are Fantasy, Horror, and Slice of Life. What a wonderfully diverse community we have!

While #FridayFlash as a Twitter meme is nearly three years old this site is a more recent development. The first post here on FFDO went up just a year ago on 22 March 2011. We are still growing and still trying to determine how best to serve the community. As we approach our first anniversary, we hope you will take some time to consider what this community means to you. What can we do together to make #FridayFlash even better?

As always, if your story is not in the listing below please go to the Collector and add the details. It will be in next week’s listing. ~Tim Continue reading »