Normally I participate in the quarterly blog hop that happens in January, April, July, and October. I would be participating in the one for January, but it isn’t happening. We (‘we’ being me and several other authors on Holly’s Writing Classes forums) dropped the ball and didn’t get our act together. We completely forgot about it.
Ooops.
To be fair, we forgot about it last year too. So, we are going to do the first quarter blog hop in February. Specifically, the last Wednesday of the month, February 26, 2025.
For those not familiar with the concept, several authors get together and write a short piece of speculative fiction, 1000 words or less. Then on the day of the blog hop, they all post their tale on their blogs, with links to all the other stories. This way, readers get a new story from the author they follow, plus more stories from other authors. It’s a good way to find new authors to read.
If you want to try writing a flash fiction yourself, go ahead and write it. Then let me know the title of the story, the name you want to be listed under, and a link to the story on your blog. It needs to be scheduled to appear at midnight, Eastern Standard Time (EST), on February 26, 2025. This way everybody’s story shows up at the same time and readers can click through to all the stories without interruption. If you don’t have a blog to post it on, let me know and I can post it on my blog.
I need to decide what I’m going to write about this year. Last year I wrote tales about Trolgar, a troll who collects tolls from travelers as they cross his bridge. I may write some more of these, put them with the tales I wrote last year and publish it as another flash fiction collection.
I think this year I’d like to try a different genre. Here’s some of my thoughts:
Space opera – daring pilots flying fighter ships in space duels that end up in explosive fireballs, lasers that go pew-pew-pew, causing showers of sparks whenever they hit something, strange alien worlds filled with strange aliens with strange customs ….
Pulp – stalwart adventurers who risk life and limb to recover relics from ancient decaying temples filled with death traps, gun battles in cars racing through slick, rainy streets, fistfights on top of zeppelins high above the city where one wrong step can end in doom. And of course, each story would end in a cliffhanger ….
Cyberpunk – cyborg street samurai clashing against each other, cybernetic eyes and enhanced reflexes, hackers retrieving data packets from AIs with lethal countermeasures, running in the shadows of a neon-lit city that always rains, mega-corporations that can buy anything, even your soul ….
Mystery men – lone heroes that stalk the streets of a dark city, dealing out two-fisted justice with the use of scientific gadgets, gangsters and criminals that try to rule their devious empires with strangleholds on the necks of the downtrodden, femme fatales with seductive allure sitting in the middle of their webs of intrigue ….
Do you have a preference, my Hordeling? Or an idea of something else you’d like to see? Leave a comment and let me know.
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