A+E

It's a dark and stormy night ... what better time to work on your 99-word Flash Fiction Issue entry? You never know, you could even end up with a book, like frequent flash contributor Neil Tarpey, whose collection of extremely short stories, Flashes of Lightning, comes out in just a few weeks. He writes that banging out quickies for the Journal's contest “sparked my passion for writing fiction limited to 101 words or fewer.” In fact, eight of the stories in the collection were first published in the Journal's pages (sample a few here and here). 

You can catch Tarpey, a retired Times-Standard sports scribe, reading from the collection at Booklegger on Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. during Arts Alive! and at Northtown Books on Nov. 11 during Arts! Arcata. Mind you, that's after this year's Oct. 24 flash fiction deadline, but you can still pick up a signed copy for luck.