Fiction | The Zombie Chimp

Archive for Fiction

Flash Fiction: Phenomena

April 14, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing 4 comments

This week’s flash fiction challenge by Terribleminds.com follows on from the previous weeks challenge. The previous weeks challenge was to write a corker of an opening line. Chuck Wendig would then choose the lines that he thought were the best. Well this week, we have to use one of those opening lines as a starter for a piece of flash fiction. Any genre, any style, but it has to be less than 1000 words as.

The line I chose to start with, well it’s kinda obvious as it is the first line but I will write it here as well out of a sense of completion.

“My brother’s birth was preceded by three distinct and inexplicable phenomena.”

You see what I did with it? Well, I hope you like it and feel free to add a comment or two.

More Writing Prompts and Ideas

March 24, 2013 Fiction, Writing No comments

Writing Prompts are useful. There we go, a very obvious statement to open up with. Especially for those times when you want to write a piece of flash fiction or a short story, maybe even a whole novel if it is a particular empty Sunday afternoon, but your inspiration has deserted you and you just don’t know what to write about.

I wrote a post a few months back (Creative Writing Prompts and Exercises) that listed ten ways of flooding your mind with new writing ideas. Is ten ideas really enough? Does my list of ten writing prompts cover every single possible way? You bet your ass it doesn’t, which is why I’m going to list even more for you here.

Flash Fiction: Cube Route

March 23, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing 4 comments

Well, I’m still trying to get back into a regular writing routine, and the flash fiction challenges hosted at Terribleminds.com are a damn good way of doing it. The challenge this week was to take five from a given list of ten words and write a piece of fiction in which those words are the main elements. This time I can’t just crowbar a word or phrase in, they have to be elements of the story.

I chose the following words:

Storm
Cube
Ethereal
Undertaker
Library

I’ve gotten a bit out of practice with these flash fiction challenges so if you do read this and have the sudden urge to leave a comment it would be graciously received (providing it is graciously written of course) and very helpful.

Flash Fiction: Inspiration

March 13, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing 3 comments

Ok, so it has been way too long since I have posted anything, especially flash fiction. This is due to two things. Firstly, I have been having some major concentration issues with the release of Simcity. I’ve been finding it difficult to focus on anything except increasing the efficiency of my mass transport network in my gambling town. Secondly, whenever I have dragged my ass out of the pit I’m in to write, I have been trying to write bits of my novel instead.

So, I sit here in a well-known coffee shop franchise far away from my computer so I have no excuse not to get some writing done, and hoorah I’ve done it. It may be a little rough around the edges but I don’t think it is too bad. I’m trying to work on that whole description thing which I’ve heard is quite important for telling tales and writing fiction.

Any who, this week’s flash fiction from Terribleminds.com is to randomly generate a sentence (from here) and use it in your flash fiction entry of no more than 1000 words. Well, I clicked a few times (I was allowed up to 10 clicks) and I got this…

“The researcher burns the rabid musician?”

I have to be honest I kinda side-stepped the use of the sentence because I didn’t want to write something about rabid musicians being burned.

Well, here it is. Hope you enjoy and you feel the need to comment. Hopefully good, but bad’s welcome too just keep it constructive.

Flash Fiction: Devil’s Advocaat

February 19, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing No comments

The gist of this week’s flash fiction is to take something from my own life and re-tell it by pushing it through the Magic Fictionising Machine. The first thing that occurred to me was that nothing at all interesting or in any way noteworthy has happened to me in my entire life. I quickly shook away this rather absurd thought. I’ve been alive for over 32 years something interesting will most certainly have happened. I just needed to think what it was.

I struggled over this for hours, until my brain got bored with stressing about it. So instead, I did my usual trick…

‘Just think of something; anything that I can write about and go from there. Maybe it will turn out OK once that writing machine has had its literary way with it.’

My brain whirred and clicked into action, it was too soon after brushing my teeth to consider having another coffee so I was on my own with this one. Then it came to me, there’s a rite of passage that everyone goes through; something that not only defines you as an adult but also dictates most of your teenage life. Today I’m going to re-tell the story of the first time I drank a little more than any normal person should.

So here we go. Hope you enjoy it, if not… well it’s keeping me busy. Oh and in lieu of the comments for the previous flash fiction I will be taking my sweet time and checking it through thoroughly. Read more

Flash Fiction: Terminus

February 10, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing 10 comments

This weeks flash fiction is based around these rather spectacular Russian photos, and some of them are pretty goddamn weird. I advise everyone to have a look at them, and just try to imagine the crazy-ass circumstances that would have led to that photo being taken. Anyway, the Terribleminds.com flash fiction challenge requires me to choose one of those photo’s and use it as inspiration for a piece of flash fiction of no more than 1000 words.

I chose this fantastic image…

…and used it to come up with this. I hope you like it, and want to click the little like button at the bottom or even better leave me a comment packed full of free and useful advice.

Thanks for reading.

Flash Fiction: Tea with Dr Chaos

January 27, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing 2 comments

More flash fiction goodness, and this week it is all about motifs. Terribleminds.com gave us a list of motifs, settings and sub-genres to randomly choose from. Whatever we chose or generated randomly should be used as part of this weeks flash fiction challenge entry. I rolled my metaphoric dice and I got…

Motif – skulls
Subgenre – Cozy Mystery
Setting – A villain volcano lair

Now, I know the dictionary definition of a motif…

“A recurrent thematic element in an artistic or literary work.”

… but I have never every thought about using one in fiction so forgive me if my usage is a little clumsy. I would love to know about any advice you may have for using motifs. Is it really as simple as just mentioning the motif a few times? I’m guessing not

Here is…

Flash Fiction: Sparks of Guilt

January 20, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing One comment

This weeks Flash Fiction challenge hosted at Terribleminds.com is a picture based challenge. He gave us a link to this website that showed us 24 truly astonishing pictures from places you would struggle to believe actually existed and weren’t Photoshop creations. All we had to do was to choose one of them and use it as inspiration for your piece of flash fiction.

I choose this photo of the Crystal Caves in Skaftafell in Iceland. Luckily the flash fiction challenge stipulated that I only had to be inspired by the photo and not actually include it, because I deviated a little from my original idea. Hopefully, you can at least see where I got my inspiration.

via. llwproductions.files.wordpress.com

As usual, I am always looking for comments, help and advice etc. So if you have any of that, please leave it in the comments below.

Here it is…

Flash Fiction: The Untold Legend of Skull Ridge

January 13, 2013 Contest Entries, Fiction, Writing 2 comments

In a similar vein to last weeks Flash Fiction hosted at Terribleminds.com, we have a whole new set of lists to generate our Flash fiction details from. With a deft flick of the wrist, I rolled my D10’s and generated the following items.

Sub-Genre: Weird West
Conflict: Someone’s been poisoned
Must feature: A mysterious stranger

Oh, and when I say I rolled a D10, I didn’t. That was a bit of creative license on my part, I used an online number generator but I thought the dice version was punchier.

Anyway, please let me know what you think in the comments bit. What did you like? What didn’t you like? How would you change it? etc. It’s all very helpful to me.

So here it is…