Sometimes success comes from unexpected places.

On a whim I submitted a flash fiction story to Havok Magazine, and surprise of surprises, it was accepted!

I don’t have the date of when it’ll be published, but I’ll be sure to let you know so you can read it (you can even vote on it if you sign up). It’s just shy of 1000 words, so it won’t take long to read. That and it was fun to write. Having concentrated on writing novels, I wasn’t sure I could pull off writing flash fiction. I guess I can after all. At least once, anyway.

But that’s not all!

Someone posted on a Facebook group of Christian speculative writers that someone should create a speculative anthology based on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, specifically the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:2-11) and the three woes (Luke 6:24-26).

So many people jumped on the idea, including a publisher of a small press who offered to publish it, that I barely managed to grab the first blessing (blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven). The stories need to be from 1-10k words with 7k the optimum.

There’s a catch, though. It has to be finished by February 7th. He’s in the military and deploying this spring, so he wants everything completed before then. Plus there’s no guarantee he’ll publish it if he doesn’t think it’s good enough.

How’s that for a challenge? So far I’ve written about 800 words. I don’t know if I’ll reach the optimum of 7000, but I figure I’ll reach at least 3000-4000.