About
Mark Twain once wrote about Mardi Gras (in Life on the Mississippi): “in their train all manner of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie–a startling and wonderful sort of show, as it filed solemnly and silently down the street in the light of its smoking and flickering torches; but it is said that in these latter days the spectacle is mightily augmented, as to cost, splendor, and variety.”
The thing that’s so great about a flash contest like this where you’re under the gun and unable to plan and plot and revise and edit is that it’s amazing the startling and wonderful sorts of giants, dwarfs, monstrosities, and other diverting grotesquerie that get pulled up from our solemn and silent internal paths. When you sort of take the conscious preparation out of the picture, you allow those shy truths hiding inside, lit only by smoking and flickering torches, to make themselves known.
Give it a try and see if it happens for you as it so often does for me. Sometimes, after I finish writing a piece of flash, I sit back and think about it, and say, “Hmh,” and nod my head, and see all the layers of meaning that piece has for me. Even if a piece isn’t well received, it might have those seeds of truth that can be pruned into something great.
Also, I find that flashing gets easier and easier the more I do it. I’m able to accept the fact that sometimes I will post a train wreck, most times I’ll post something acceptable, and sometimes….sometimes…I’ll get a gem. When a topic doesn’t move me, I just begin typing, and I keep typing, because I just never know what’s hiding in there.
And who am I? Who are we, the collective owners of Show Me Your Lits?
Errid Farland lives in Southern California and writes at a cluttered table where a candle burns to create an aura of serenity. Sometimes she accidentally catches things on fire which turns the aura into angry yellows and reds and sort of wrecks the whole serenity thing. Her stories have appeared in Barrelhouse, Thieves Jargon, Cezanne’s Carrot, Word Riot, storySouth, Pindledyboz, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), GUD, Tuesday Shorts, Underground Voices, Lit Up, Cause & Effect, Quantum Muse, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Diddledog, The Story Garden, Lyrica, Drunk and Lonely Men, Tweet the Meat, Silver Boomers’ This Path Anthology, decomP, PANK, Dew on the Kudzu, Nanoism, Seedpod, The Legendary, Defenestration, The MacGuffin, Anemone Sidecar, LITnIMAGE, and she hopes she hasn’t forgotten anybody. She’s usually not this thorough. One of her stories received an editor nomination for storySouth’s Million Writers Awards.
Mike Munsil lives (for his sins) in Southeast Texas. He is founder of the writer’s site Liberty Hall Writers and a new themed ezine The Land Divided. His published works can be found at Tuesday Shorts, Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), Haruah, Riverwalk Journal and elsewhere. Contrary to what some nasty people say, he is NOT a poet and refuses to ever again wear Poet-Pants to a publisher’s party. Who knew?
Now it’s Ricky’s turn. Here, Ricky. Here, ricky! C’mon, thass a good boy.