Last Week’s MM: X-Men: Days of Future Past

I like flash fiction.  If you read my blog, you know that every Friday I post a flash fiction story.  What you may not know, is that sometimes these stories are prompted by the terribleminds blog.  This blog is run by the author Chuck Wendig. 

I think it was sometime just over a year ago, my boyfriend and I were hitting the writing thing hard.  But, even though we were in our stride, we wanted to get better at writing.  He would whip up exercises for us to do, and we had a lot of fun doing them.  It was actually him that found the Terrible Minds blog.  We decided to do one of his weekly prompts.  Well, I think to this day, my guy still hasn’t written his flash fiction.  But I fell in love with them.  I got addicted.

At first, I planned to do three flash fictions a day.  Or something equally ridiculous.  I wanted to pump out 100 and release them in an anthology.  I was, and still tend to be, a bit ambitious.  It was too much to ask of myself.  It was a better use of my time to post them here.  In the beginning, I had quite the backlog of stories.  I would write one or two on the bus while I was heading to work.  At times, that job was so slow that I’d write one while I was at work.  But the occasionally busy schedule has caused me to tap into to most of those and use them on here.

Most weeks I use the prompt from the TerribleMindsBlog.  Not because I can’t think of anything myself.   Sometimes there isn’t one, or it goes up late.  Sometimes I don’t think the prompt is quite what I’m looking for.  In those cases, I go off on my own, or have my boy prompt me.

But most of the time, it’s a good prompt.  I enjoy sharing my work there because it’s a community of like-minded people who set out with the specific goal of reading and writing flash fiction.

But I think that it’s safe to say that without TerribleMinds, without Chuck Wending, I may never have found flash fiction.

So, obviously, the flash challenges are my favorite part of his blog.  But there is so much more there.  I feel the struggle to post here four times a week, but he somehow finds the time to post nearly every day, and while being a full time professional writer and dad.

He has a lot of great writing advice.  He also sells books with the same subject.  He has a few free stories up on his website.  I’ve looked at a couple.  I like his off-the-cuff blog writing better than his structured fiction, but that’s not to say it isn’t good.  I haven’t read his books yet, but he has many, including one that I believe will soon be a TV show.

He also includes a lot of guest bloggers.  They often talk about things they learned while writing their novels.

And then there’s the occasional life/situational post.

Check it out.  It’s a wealth of info, often inspirational, and, just to warn you, full of gratuitous language.  But so funny.  I hope I can be as clever as he is some day.

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Looks like I’m not the only one talking about him today.  Just went to his twitter feed to make sure I tagged his user name right and found this article from Clarkesworld.