National Flash Fiction Day and starting afresh

It was yesterday, but don't let that worry you because FlashFlood posted new stories every ten minutes so plenty of people are no doubt still catching up on their free reading. One of those stories was my own Guilt by Association (known in these parts as 'Are you still with Malcolm? No, we none of us are, are we'. Titles don't always seem to stick to stories, but that's a subject for another day) which obviously I recommend you wander along and read.

I haven't been submitting stories much this year, so it was great to see something of mine out there. Earlier in the year I was concentrating on the storytelling for York Festival of Ideas, now I'm working on a monologue for Ilkley Writers' event at the Ilkley Literature Festival fringe. In between that I've finally finished the first draft of a crime story I've been picking at for a couple of years (which needs much more work before it goes anywhere), and I'm trying to finish a story I started last year when I was doing a creative writing MOOC. The novella about a teenager searching for a half-sibling who may or may not exist has been put on hold for a while.

Consequently it feels a bit weird to start a new story from scratch, I haven't done that for ages. I mean not deliberately constrained flash or hint fiction, but a full-blown short story that has a couple of thousand words or more to play out and do its thing. I've spent a couple of hours (more, probably) this weekend looking through my bits and pieces file, the place I write down every stray line, wild idea and resonant character name, where all my 5 minute free-writing gets copied in case it's holding a partially-obscured gem. I was agonising over what to use, so many possibilities (though this is for a non-genre short story competition and lots of my ideas are SF or crime) so I read a few out to OneMonkey and got shrugs or Not really my kind of thing but..., until one I wasn't sure about but felt it had potential. Yes, write that one he said. But write it well.