Casket Girls In Finals for Defenestrationism 2022 Flash Suite Contest
The call itself seemed a little bit goofy: What is a Flash Suite, you may ask.
Our team defines, albeit loosely, a flash suite as follows,
“A series of at least three flash fiction works that correlate, and build to something greater. Recurring characters, extended motifs, harmonious subject matters, and/or sustained narrative are such correlations– but we encourage innovation and new ideas.”
Go crazy with it, kids, flash your faces off.
Nevertheless, it seemed like fun. A “suite” of three flash stories or more. And, truth to tell, I have a mounting inventory of tales of New Orleanian urban legend-inspired Aimée and her fellow “Casket Girls” (cf. July 9, et many al.), some harder to market than others, of which thoughts of possible chapbook publication in bunches has crossed my mind. And this, headlined FLASH SUITE Contest-two cash winners | Defenestrationism.net, spoke of contests, and judging, and . . .
These finalists are then published daily, before winners are announced, followed by at least two weeks of Fan Voting.
Winners are selected by our panel of four Judges, with Fan Voting counting as an additional judge vote.
And relatively small money prizes, for just one winner and one runner up out of (judging from the past few years) a field of about eight finalists, most likely more mainstream than genre fiction, but . . . what the hell, why not! So off to the stock of unsold stories (one story could be published before, by the rules, but part of the idea is to clear inventory — and, often more character studies than killer thrill pieces, many of these are hard sells by themselves) and, long story short (ahem) I composed an approximately 3300-word suite of five tales of varying lengths from 120 words to about 1000 (the upper limit).
Thus “Casket Suite,” composed of five parts: “The Flavor of the Jest,” an alternate “origin” story of Aimée and the others’ original 1728 coming to the New World from France; “A Surfeit of Poe,” a mid-1850s placing of les filles in their literary context, as led by the “poetic” casket girl, Yvonne; “Reflections,” in which we meet glamor-casket girl Lo in a musing on vampiric superstitions, and which ones are wrong; “Shades of Difference,” also not anchored to a specific time, the shortest tale depicting an amusing conversation on the color red; and “What’s In a Name?” with Aimée again, and relations with humans both there and in France.
Then off it went five days before deadline, and today the reply came from Contest Editor Paul-Newell Reaves: Yes, Chantelle and I quite like your Flash Suite, “Casket Suite,” and would be honored to publish you along with the other finalists in our 2022 FLASH SUITE Contest on Defenestrationism.net.
Finalists will post across December, followed by two weeks of fan voting — which will count as an additional judge vote, to combine with our four Contest Judges’ votes to select the winners. Winners will be announced MLK Day, US — which is January 17th.
And there you have it.
