Flash City is now closed.
Check back Monday, September 19th
at 9am Pacific for results.
Slackers rejoice!
Procrastinator Special keeps late entries
open until end of day Pacific Time September 15th.
“Find a city,
find myself a city to live in.”
– David Byrne
Submit to Flash City
Our late summer contests have historically taken an outdoorsy bent, with Flash Beast, Wild Flash, Flash Odyssey, and Elemental Flash hitting during the past four summers. Throughout these contests, we’ve enjoyed stories with rugged terrain, primal instincts, and harsh elements. This year is no different, but the setting requirements have changed. As the mercury rises here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re focused on a different sort of wild kingdom—the concrete jungle. `
That’s right, as the title suggests, our Flash City contest seeks stories with some urban, suburban, or industrial aspect or setting. The city element of your story doesn’t need to be a metropolis; towns can work too as long as we’re within the city limits. Your city can be extraterrestrial, futuristic, ancient, vibrant, dread-inducing or unconventional. Basically, we’re looking for some sort of society or civilization here, even if that’s found in unexpected places without any big “Welcome to..” sign blazing at the outskirts.
Wanna get real weird with it and incorporate a colony of ant-people into your story? Knock yourself out. Interested in writing about a industrial-strength pogo-stick salesman who’s deathly afraid of springs? You do you. Whether penthouse fat cats or scrappy sewer-dwellers, utopias or dystopias, the Emerald City or Gotham, we want your dark and offbeat flash fiction entries to overlap with human-made constructions. The city can simply be an atmospheric backdrop or a primary character in and of itself. Set your stories in real cities, or make up fictional ones. We like variety, so get creative, damn it.
We like literary approaches, but we also dig genre and pulpy takes as well. Art house or grindhouse. Subvert the usual tropes to create something nobody’s ever seen before.
The top three entries will win cash money (USD).
$300 for Flash City winner
$200 for 2nd place
$100 for 3rd place
We also give mad respect to 4th-10th place,
publishing them in our Flash City mega-issue
and in a future print anthology.
(Grab a copy of Vol. 6 HERE.)
Submit to Flash City
Follow these guidelines, and you could come away with cash, online/print publication, and sweet, sweet glory.
– All submissions must absolutely be under 1,000 words, and we tend to look more kindly on 750 or fewer because… PIZZA RAT!
– All names are concealed on contest submissions during judging, so we won’t be playing favorites.
– Please paste your entry into the corresponding field. Do not list your name anywhere or we’ll assume you don’t know how to read.
– Entry fee is $8 $10 during Procrastinator Special. (Sorry, no refunds.)
– We reserve the right to extend deadlines if necessary (and you can expect our usual week-ish Procrastinator’s Special with corresponding increase in entry fee for you slackers).
– Submissions must be previously unpublished work, and you will retain copyright. By entering this contest, you give us permission to publish your work (if selected for our Top 10) both online and in a future print anthology.
– No limit on how many entries you can submit, but you must submit them one at a time. Don’t just mash them all in there.
– Contest soft final deadline is end of day (PDT) Tuesday, September 6th Thursday, September 15th, 2022. Winners announced on September 19th and we’ll unleash the Flash City mega-issue shortly thereafter.
– And, most importantly, this is a FLASH CITY contest, so your entry must an urban or industrial setting or some form of society/civilization. But again, this can be in any form imaginable.
So that means you can do something like this…
or this…
or this…
or this…
or even this…
Submit to Flash City
The Molotov Cocktail 