where
short story collections step into the

Flash Fiction describes stories of less than 1500 words. One often quoted example is Ernest Hemingway’s six-worder. “For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.” This is an extreme example as most Flash Fiction is a good deal longer, but it does serve to illustrate that what you will read is not only extremely short but extremely clever. These are tales where every word counts and often counts more than once. These are stories that are written with a special kind of reader in mind. A reader who is willing to invest some time and effort in teasing out the deeper meaning of the piece. A reader who is prepared to accept a brief description and colour in the rest themselves. That these stories work at all is a tribute to the extraordinary talent and skill of the people who write them and the extraordinary imagination and patience of the people who read them. When the two come together the result is magical.

HeavyGlow Flash Fiction: Two Years Burning Brightly is a collection of Flash Fiction stories taken from the e-zine HeavyGlow that for two glorious years offered a wonderfully rich and eclectic mix of stories of every conceivable genre and style. Science Fiction rubbed shoulders with Romance. Conflict cosied up with Horror. You never knew when you entered a story where it would spit you out, but you always knew that each and every story would leave you irrevocably changed. The HeavyGlow web site has been bookmarked on my computer since the day I first discovered it and has been required reading ever since.

The first print anthology of this virtual magazine was produced in mid 2007 and is well worth acquiring regardless of whether you get an actual hard copy or the PDF version. There are fifty-nine stories in total re-printed exactly as they originally appeared. This is important as none of these stories is more than 750 words long and they are all honed to a fine edge.

In keeping with minimalist nature of the work this volume does not have any decoration or illustrations. There is nothing to create images in your mind until you dip into the stories themselves and there you will find much that is rich and strange.