Flashmobbing flash fiction - Guest Post by Sarah-Clare Conlon

I’ve been writing – and writing about – flash fiction for a while now and I love how diverse a discipline it can be. Ask me my definition and I bet it’ll be different to what you were told last time, and different again to what you’re told next. And that’s what’s so great about writing micro: it might be small in scale but it’s more than substantial in scope, from process to performance. 

And that's what the Manchester-based FlashTag writing collective (which consists of Manchester Blog Awards winners and flash fiction writers Benjamin Judge, David Hartley, Fat Roland and Tom Mason - oh, and me) were thinking about when we came up with our idea for a National Flash-Fiction Day event. We're fans of site-specific stories and of delivering our prose in unusual ways, so we've decided to treat the rainy city to some guerrilla story-telling; some flash fiction flashmobbing, if you will. We plan to travel across town, stopping off at various locations - from cultural venues to iconic spaces - where one of the group will read out a piece of short fiction to the public then move on. We're not releasing details of the itinerary until the day, when you can follow our progress - and perhaps catch us in action - via our Twitter account, @flashtagmcr.

The FlashTag collective is currently running a flash fiction writing competition as part of Chorlton Arts Festival: you have until midnight today (Friday 27 April) to enter! Full details here: http://flashmobmcr.wordpress.com/

Sarah-Clare Conlon is a writer and editor, and one half of flash fiction/music combo Les Malheureux with David Gaffney. You can read more from her on award-winning arts blog Words & Fixtures.