I originally wrote it during a charity flash marathon in less than an hour, and I really wasn’t sure whether it was actually worthy of a wider audience – in fact, I almost pulled it from the EDF submission queue. So I’m quite pleasantly surprised that (at the time of writing at least) it seems to have got a favourable reaction. You never can tell, can you?

No money will change hands as a result of this, but I am now permitted to use the piece of “blog bling” that you see decorating this post and – more importantly – the piece appears in the amazingly cool video that you can see here:

Oddly enough, I was doing quite well in this year’s competition until Round 6. I see a pattern emerging. Round 7 is due in tomorrow midnight, and I haven’t the faintest clue what I’m going to write about. Ho hum.

The anthology was initiated by Brent Millis, who tweets as @idiotandroid, and it was duly published earlier on this month as a free download (in a bewildering variety of formats) from Smashwords, here. The cover was designed by Piotr Kowalczyk, otherwise known as @namenick, and there’s a full list of authors on his blog, here.

It’s an entertaining read. It’s inevitably hit and miss, but the hits more than outweigh the misses and some of the hits are absolute bullseyes. Oh, and I almost forgot to mention that I’ve got four stories in there myself.

And if you want one yourself, they’re available free all over London at places like Foyles, Rough Trade and so on. Don’t forget to say “I know that bloke” when you ask for yours. The person behind the counter will be so impressed.

Of course, as soon as I saw that it was coming up I panicked, trying to work out what on earth I could say about my day that might be of the slightest interest to anyone. And then I saw this obituary notice in the Independent. Isn’t that the best picture ever?

So I now had a hook for my piece, which soon mutated into something close to a personal manifesto. This, then, is essentially me saying Why I Write.

Wonder whatever happened to the poor kangaroo?

The introductory pieces by the editors are also well worth a read – particularly the one by Jordan Lapp on finding a business model for fiction on the web. Here’s a slightly scary quote:

It seems that, excluding patronage, no one has yet found a profitable business model for short fiction on the web.

And that comes from an editor at the most-read flash fiction magazine on the web. Interestingly, though, he does say that one of their goals for 2010 is to raise their pay rates to semi-pro level instead of token, by the expedient of running a paid-for competition. Good luck to him there, although to be honest I’m personally not that concerned about pay rates at EDF (but don’t tell him I said so). The fact that EDF is such a well-read magazine makes it a terrific – and fairly competitive – place to get published in if you want to raise your profile a bit. Every time I’ve got a piece there, the hit count for this place goes up quite significantly, and for me that’s what I’m after right now. The big question, of course, is how to turn that exposure into £££.