Michelle McGill-Vargas

Well, it finally happened. Got the email justifying all those hours I’ve spent hunched over a computer, banging out stories I hope someone other than me will like.  The email that says, “Congratulations. Your submission has been accepted…”

A flash fiction story of mine about the futility of doomsday preppers will be published in the March 2014 of issue of Splickety Magazine. I don’t know if I’m getting paid for it. Don’t care. I’m just excited the editor accepted it. I had a nonfiction piece published in 2010. I was excited then because it was the first time I EVER had something published (and was paid for it). But this time it’s fiction, and since I want to become a published novelist, this is a step forward in the right direction.

I rather enjoy writing flash fiction, a form I discovered at my first Midwest Writers conference last year. By the end of the two-hour intensive session, the instructor had challenged us to come up with a piece. While everyone else furiously wrote for thirty minutes, I drew a blank. How in the world does one compress an entire story into less than 1000 words? But the examples he showed us had backstory, dialogue, theme. Almost all of the five senses were employed. All of it compressed onto one or two pages. Impossible! My brain doesn’t work that way. Besides, I want to write a novel.

Then I tried it. And liked it. It’s not easy to do. Every word in the piece has to count. So now that I’ve found the courage to press “Send” for my doomsday piece, I’ll try to see if I can find a home for the other three collecting dust on my laptop.