In my heart of hearts, I'm completely and utterly purple in my prose. I'm glaringly lush and superfluously descriptive…but alas, I learned the hard way that such a style is relegated to the oft-mocked annals of romantic literature history (sigh).
So, despite a revulsion for both the man and his style, I learned to pare down my writing with Hemingway as the model of perfection. Long story short (pun intended): it worked. Well, the man could get a point across, I'll give him that.
I participate in Flash Fiction contests, where any extra bits sticking out of a story get sanded off by a set of reviewers with both keen eyes and a fascination for brevity (and small words, but that's a different gripe). Flash Fiction is 1,000 words or less. I was getting pretty good at those.
Now that same old writing gang of mine is into Micro-Fiction, damn their hairy butts! I have to find even thinner ways to tell stories. I'm not sure I'm up to it, but here is my entry for the current contest:
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Heavy Flies the Fleeing Heart
100 words
The bridge shook with the roar of engine strain to lift. Her ship dodged falling pieces of other ships. Planet collapse was mayhem.
“Full throttle!” she ordered.
“Gonna fail!” Systems reported back. Below them, the planet was sucking itself into its core. “Spheres?”
The illegal, alien-tech, anti-grav engines had the power to boost them across the event horizon, but it would triple the crush of everything in their wake, dooming the ships behind them still struggling to rise.
“Push primaries!”
A stomach lurching deceleration accompanied System’s voice. “Engines failed!”
***
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