Revisiting the Tiny

A simple placeholder announcement for now… You may recall that last month, I entered a “100-word Microfiction Challenge.” (If you have no idea what this refers to, I first posted about it here; the, er, post-mortem post — as of the first round’s completion — is here.) That contest’s organizers will announce the results of the first-round judging process on Wednesday, June 24. The top 20 (of no more than 100) participants in each group* will advance to the second round; this runs from 11:59 p.m. Friday, June 26, to 11:59 the next night.

…all of which is to say: I hope to occasionally post a new practice story here at Running After My Hat over the next three weeks. Sadly, I can’t promise that this will be to your benefit; odds are, after all, you won’t even get to experience vicariously the thrill (such as it is) of my advancing to Round 2. And as you already know from last month’s eight practice samples, the quality of the stories themselves will be uneven. No, these practice sessions are mostly for me: to force me into something like the mindset required to “write short,” on random assignments of no more than 100 words each.

I drew my first one of these practice assignments last night:

• Genre: comedy
• Word: stir
• Action: yanking my chain

…and so I’ll post a micro-story sometime today.

Thank you for continuing to indulge me!

_____

* For the record, I was in group 66, consisting of 95 participants. (All but eight groups included 95 entrants; those eight had 96.) My group’s assignment was to write a 100-word (or shorter) story in the romance genre, featuring some form of the word forget, and involving the act of roller skating. I’ll post I’ve posted the story in an entry here after the first-round results are announced, regardless of whether or not I’ll be going onto Round 2.