Discount Noir

From Co-Editor Patricia Abbott:

In October 2009, my co-anthologist Steve Weddle suggested I use a website that I’ll call The People of Megamart as the inspiration for a flash fiction challenge.

Keeping a blog can be a solipsistic and silly venture, and to combat this tendency, I’ve promoted several communal activities over the years and I have maintained a website. The first was Friday’s Forgotten Books, in which, every Friday, crime and western fiction writers and readers write brief reviews of books they believe to be forgotten.

But since most readers of my blog are short story writers, I decided in February 2008, to issue a flash fiction challenge. (I was far from the first to do so.) This was not a contest but rather an inclusive invitation to write a story of about 800 words and post it on an assigned day. This first challenge was to write a story set on Valentine’s Day. For those without blogs, Aldo Calgano posted stories on his flash zine, Powder Burn Flash. Gerald So helped to advertise the challenge. It was a success and each of the succeeding four challenges drew more entries. Each challenge had its own topic—my favorite being one in which each participant wrote an opening paragraph that was passed on to someone else.

For our sixth challenge, Megamart: I Love You, writers were asked to contribute a story set, or partially set, in a Megamart or Megamart-type store. This topic generated more than thirty stories, all published simultaneously on various blogs on November 30, 2009. Those stories and a few more can be found here. I hope you enjoy them.