Five Minute Flashes, Part 2

The short version: Fantasycon 2017, Ready Steady Flash, Lee Harris, writing stories in five minutes in front of a live audience, myself, Guy Adams, Anna Smith Spark and Jeanette Ng.  A darkening spot upon the surface of the sun.  A hot wind with the odour of fresh blood.  Elder gods stirring in their sunken graves.  Death ... death ... death!

Alternatively, the long version is here.

So, story number three was on the topic The Night of the Kittens, which is certainly the kind of subject that someone might come up with if a lunatic jabbed a microphone in their face and demanded that they give them a short story topic.  I bet Tolstoy never had to deal with situations like this!  I bet no-one ever told Voltaire that he had a write a story about kittens in five minutes!  I bet Joyce wasn't such an attention whore that he'd have agreed to something like this in the first place!*

This one's called The Night of the Kittens, presumably because I'd briefly recovered my ability to write obvious titles at this point...

Bill knew when he bought the house that it shouldn't have been half so cheap as it was.  There was the nuclear power plant next door, for a start; nothing ought to glow like that.  And there was the fact that the estate agent kept trying to downplay the fact that the foundations were built on an ancient Indian burial ground.  And then there was the secret government facility at the end of the road, with the armed guards in dark glasses and the weird smog hovering over it.  But what were they to do?  They had to move the cat sanctuary somewhere, especially now that Bopsy, Mrs Whiskers, Purditer and Snuggles were all of them pregnant. 

In retrospect, though, Bill thought, as he nailed another plank over the cellar door and tried to ignore the weirdly shrill, distorted mewling from the other side, the decision was certainly a mistake.

Honestly, the only thing I'm remotely proud of in that one is that I managed to come up with four different silly cat names.  And one of the four was the actual name that I actually called my actual cat when I was nine, so even that's a stretch.

But for the final round I had a back-up plan, and I was just about exhausted enough by then to run with it.  In the spirit of full disclosure, I sort of had the idea for this one in mind already, as a kind of mental bomb-shelter for in case things got really bad, and it was a case of cheat a little or forfeit by hurling myself out of the nearest window.  For this final, apocalyptic round, we had a choice of three topics, which were Inside Out, Shakespeare's Brain and Interdimensional Toilets.  And the result is called, for reasons that I don't remember and probably never existed in the first place, Aristotle's Last Dance...

It was a dark and stormy night.  Three writers sat on a bench.  The first turned to the other two and said, "You know what, I was recently invited to be on a flash fiction writing contest by that bastard Lee Harris.  You had to write short stories in five minutes.  It was terrifying!"

"That sounds like the worst thing ever," said the second writer.

The third writer, who was mute, just nodded their agreement.

"So how did it go?" the second writer asked.

"Well, the first three rounds were merely hellish.  But the fourth, on the topic of Inside Out, Shakespeare's Brain or Interdimensional Toilets ... Christ, that was just impossible!"

"But you came up with something in the end, right?"

"Well, yes, in the end I did.  But it was a close run thing."

"You have to share it with us, after all this tedious build-up.  Otherwise, what are we even doing here, sitting on this bench in this middle of this dark, stormy night?"

"No," the first writer said, "I'd rather not."

One final thought, because I don't want to leave you with that awful, awful joke.  I said that the above was my mental bomb-shelter, but in fact, I had a backup plan for my backup plan.  If all else failed, I was planning to read the limerick that I'd written a couple of days before and try and pass it off as in some way a response to the actual topic.  So here, by way of dropping the curtain on the tragic drama that was my Ready, Steady Flash experience, is said limerick...

There was a young porpoise named Maurice,

Whose skin was excessively porous,

He shouldn't have ought to

Gone under the water,

That tragic, unfortunate porpoise.

I'm convinced that if I'd got to read my limerick I would totally have won.




* I'm kidding, of course.  James Joyce would have lapped up Ready, Steady Flash and come back for seconds.  Yeah, Joyce, you heard me right!

Five Minute Flashes, Part 1

So I may have mentioned that I took part in the Ready Steady Flash challenge at this year's Fantasycon, in which myself, Guy Adams, Anne Smith Spark and Jeanette Ng were challenged by the nefarious mister Lee Harris to write flash fiction stories on previously unannounced topics, in a whoppingly tiny five minutes, and the winner was whoever managed to last the full hour without throwing up, passing out, running screaming from the room or some combination of the three.  Or, wait, maybe it had something to do with how loud the audience were clapping?  Honestly, my memories are a blur; I remember sitting down and I remember being in the bar afterwards downing medicinal glasses of wine, but the gap in between is - well, it's just darkness.  And it's best not to probe that darkness too deeply.  Already the shakes are starting again...

Fortunately I don't have to relive the traumas of those long, long minutes to share the stories that I wrote!  Because I have them saved on my desktop.  And since previous participants chose to share their efforts, presumably in the hope of stressing out future participants even more than they were already stressed out, I've decided to do the same.  Unfortunately these are the sole surviving record of that night, as I was the only one who'd brought a laptop; I should stress that, since I didn't win, these are certainly not the catastrophically low standard that Guy, Anne and Jeanette should be judged by.

That said, I did manage to win the first round!  The subject was Fairies in Space, and my story, funnily enough, was also called Fairies in Space...

"So here's what I'm thinking," Commander Vladovitch said, "the dog went pretty well.  We know we can send a dog into space, right?  And it seemed quite happy." 

"Well," co-commander Turganov said, "the dog died." 

"That's true.  But until it died, it seemed happy enough." 

"This is true." 

"And the monkey went well, yes?  We know that a monkey can survive in space."  

"The monkey did die as well, though."  

"This is also true.  But until then..."  

"Yes," co-commander Turganov agreed, "the monkey did seem happy until it's last agonised moments."  

"But," Commander Vladovitch said, "I'm not sure that we're quite ready to send a human into space.  What with all the dying and everything.  So, what I was thinking..."  

"Yes, commander?"

"What I was thinking was fairies.  They're a lot like people, only more little.  So we'd only need a small spaceship." 

"That's true.  They are a lot like people.  And the spaceship could be very small indeed.  But commander... I can foresee just one problem..."

If I'm honest, it's probably more of a one act play than a flash fiction story, but what the heck?  I wrote it in five minutes.  You try writing anything that's not a shopping list in five minutes, in front of an audience of ravening, bloodthirsty ghouls.  (I mean, I remember them as ravening, bloodthirsty  ghouls; I guess, in retrospect, that they were just normal people, and not terrifying at all.  Actually, that even makes more sense.)

Story two!  Well, story two isn't even a story, now that I go back to it.  It also doesn't make much sense, unless you know that the topic was Porcine Love and Lee misheard that as Paul Simon Love, and that stuck more than the actual subject did.  Oh, and this one's called Untitled, perhaps because I was already pretty confused by this point...

Everyone blamed Garfunkel for what happened.  Everyone said that he was the one with no talent.  Heck, he didn't even write any of their songs!  And that singing voice ... the phrase "like a castrated cat" got trotted out more than once.  And certainly, if you were to look at their solo careers after that tragic day when the pair finally decided they would never work together again, it would be hard not to say that, yes, Garfunkel was indeed the weak link in one of the greatest musical partnerships ever to produce the soundtrack to a Mike Nichols film.  

But only Garfunkel would ever know the truth, and it burned in his heart and soul then he could never, ever share it.  For would have believed him?  Who would have listened?  Who could have accepted the dreadful truth?  

How could he ever reveal that Paul Simon's true song-writing partner was his secret lover?  And that his secret lover was a pig?

Porcine!  Paul Simon!  D'you see?  Yeah, okay, maybe not my finest moment, and I'm not sure that anyone got the Mike Nichols gag either.

But it's okay!  Because there are still a whole two more stories to go, and they're - gasp! - even worse.  I'm not even kidding!  I'm literally only splitting this post in two because having all four of these things together would probably have caused my laptop to spontaneously combust or something...