I love writing short stories, but projects like Nanowrimo encourage longer manuscripts, so I hadn’t written anything less than 50,000 words for a while. When I learned about A Story a Day in May, I jumped in whole-hog.
Every day, I wrote a complete short story based loosely on the prompt emailed to me. The stories ranged from 8 to 2,012 words. At the end of May, I figured I was done with these 31 stories.
A lot of them were awful, but a few were worth editing. I’ve been entering them in various flash fiction contests and magazines. One of these stories was “The Change.”
I entered “The Change” in the Blue Animal Flash Fiction Contest. To my surprise, I won First Prize and was published in the June 2020 Blue Literature e-zine.
Here is the blurb the judges wrote about my story:
Congratulations! Your story has been selected for publication in our June competition!
I thought this story was very interesting in its subject matter and the way it goes about addressing it. There is a palpable tension when readers begin to consider the pitfalls of what permanent invisibility would be like, and I think in that way you created a sense of dramatic irony where the character herself is unaware of how bad things would get but the readers are. It is like knowing a monster is behind a door that a character is about to open, except in this case the monster is formless and inescapable. The use of societal commentary was very well done and is nuanced enough to be very eloquent and thought-provoking. For these reasons among others, we are happy to be publishing your story on our website!
I’d love for you to read my winning entry and the other stories in Blue Animal Literature.