I’m so thrilled to announce that my piece “I’m invited to Watch Them Feed Her Body Into the Incinerator” was highly commended in the 2026 National Flash Fiction Day Microfiction Competition!
You can read it online HERE and in the anthology released this summer!
My biggest writing accomplishment this year was, of course, publishing Green Light… even though it was written back in 2022! I’m glad it wasn’t immediately picked up, though, because publishing it on the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby is too perfect. A lot of my “writing” life dealt with interviews, reviews, podcasts, and fun extras relating to the book and its release. Get quick links to those things here!
I did a lot of my usual favorite writing experiences, like National Flash Fiction Day and the Ekphrastic Marathon.
I only had 26 submissions this year, yikes! I slacked a lot earlier in the year, but with my birthday resolutions in September, I promised to submit 4 places each month, and have done so since then! I just needed to kick my own butt into gear. I had 8 acceptances from those submissions. (I submitted 45 times in 2024, 111 in 2023, 134 in 2022, and 52 in 2021.)
I wrote several reviews for MicroLit Almanac, plus three craft essays for Intrepidus Ink. (I also wrote and submitted my essay for March Sadness, which of course won’t go live until March, but it’s definitely an accomplishment and I’m really proud of it.)
I started a monthly Substack, posting an article on the 14th of every month. I’ll be honest, it’s mostly just me trying to harness my LiveJournal days, but I have ideas for next year that might truly orient the posts toward “the love of writing,” as the name suggests it should.
While not specifically writing related, I was accepted to be a Short Story/Flash Fiction reader for Split/Lip Press. I’ve missed working with that team and am glad to be back in some small role, and I really think this will help my writing and editing life so much to read amazing submissions during the reading period. I’ll also continue to be a contest editor for Flash Fiction Magazine throughout the year; it’s always inspiring to read stories and help writers revise them (if necessary!).
Speaking of that… I also celebrated the one year anniversary of Lightning Flash Writing!
If you need help polishing your work (flash fiction, short stories, novels – I do it all!), getting your ideas on the page, or marketing yourself or your book, I’m here to help!
Related Posts:
Janet Dale and I got to talk Gatsby on an episode of the Book Squad Goals podcast! Mostly we talk about the 2013 film version but we go off the rails in a few (aka many) parts for a delightfully good time.
Check out their podcast page so you can listen via whatever service you use.
I’m honored that Samantha Zimmerman, editor at Pine Hills Review, spent so much time with Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle, and asked such thoughtful questions in this interview!
In June 2021, I took part in Jami Attenberg’s 1,000 Words of Summer. I wrote at least 1,000 words per day for two weeks, and those pieces included all nine flash stories that eventually ended up in Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle. (The first few days of writing were something else entirely… but we won’t go there.)
Janet had already found her poems. In fact, her idea of using the first page of each chapter is why I used a sentence from the first page of each chapter to start a flash story. But we didn’t collaborate. It wasn’t until later that we put it all together and realized… hey, this works!
We sent Green Light out into the world—to nine publishers total! The last submission was to Alien Buddha Press. Red loved the book but had never worked with two authors on one project before, so he encouraged us to each submit our own books instead. And we did! (Janet published ghosts passing through and I published Won’t Be By Your Side.)
However, as the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby grew closer, we knew we needed to get this book out in the world. With all the excitement celebrating that centennial, it would be perfect timing! So we reached out to Alien Buddha Press once more, hoping that Red would be willing to work with us as a duo since he’d worked with us individually. And he agreed! We streamlined things for him (I hope!) and marketed the hell out of the book for six weeks leading up to its publication date of April 10, 2025 – 100 years after the original Gatsby!
Just for fun, here are photos of my original handwritten drafts of the flash in Green Light.
And for even more fun, here are the word counts – then and now:
Chapter 1: 1057, now 738
Chapter 2: 1008, now 729
Chapter 3: 1064, now 694
Chapter 4: 1013, now 700
Chapter 5: 1126, now 732
Chapter 6: 1023, now 714
Chapter 7: 1002, now 705
Chapter 8: 1117, now 712
Chapter 9: 1074, now 668
Fellow Alien Buddha Press author Sam Szanto interviewed us about Green Light: A Gatsby Cycle.
I’m thrilled to share that my short essay is live at Intrepidus Ink! It’s called “Avoiding Stories That Go Nowhere”—part three of a three-part series on what makes stories truly work.
Read my latest essay here: Avoiding Stories That Go Nowhere
Part One: The Shift Moment: How to Transform a Static Scene Into an Unforgettable Experience
I’m thrilled to share that my short essay is live at Intrepidus Ink! It’s called “The Art of Focus: Slice-of-Life V. Narrative Arc”—part two of a three-part series on what makes stories truly work.
Read my latest essay here: The Art of Focus: Slice-of-Life V. Narrative Arc
And Part One here: The Shift Moment: How to Transform a Static Scene Into an Unforgettable Experience
I’m thrilled to share that my short essay is live at Intrepidus Ink! It’s called “The Shift Moment: How to Transform a Static Scene Into an Unforgettable Experience”—part one of a three-part series on what makes stories truly work.
I’ve had the honor of being an editor at Intrepidus Ink since its inception in 2022! Over the years, I’ve read incredible stories, learned from brilliant writers and editors, and deepened my appreciation for the craft of storytelling. Being part of this magazine has been nothing short of inspiring.
Read my essay here: The Shift Moment: How to Transform a Static Scene Into an Unforgettable Experience
Want to find your own poetry from pages of The Great Gatsby just like Janet Dale? She created a PDF of the last page of each chapter of the book so you can find poems.
Share them with us on social media (or in the comments here, or via DM/email/etc) when you’re done! We’d love to see and share what you create.
Allison Renner Writes 