Have you noticed how people judge internet-based writing in  a totally different way to works that come to them in a more traditional form? Or have you wondered about the startled reactions flash fiction receives from non-internet using readers?

Just in case you’re wondering who ‘you’ is in the paragraph above, I mean ‘you’ the reader who actually reads articles on blogs as well as in magazines and newspapers.

Well, there is work from some international competition winners  in the next Earlyworks Press anthology, ‘Misfit Mirror’. We have poems from Margaret Eddershaw, Maxine Linnell and Sylvia Oldroyd. We have flash fiction from Kenneth Schneyer, and both poetry and flash fiction from well known internet writers such as Cathy Edmunds and Rachel Green.  We are going to be measuring some new and traditional forms of fiction and poetry, as well as comparing poets working in the old world and the new. We’d really like to know what you think of the idea.

Here is the editor’s note I have just written for Misfit Mirror. You’ll see what I’m looking for, I think…

Editor’s Note

This anthology is somewhat of an experiment. Earlyworks Press anthologies are assembled to showcase the winners of our competitions, and the work of the Writers and Reviewers Club. In the course of working with the club and administrating the competitions, I have come across people with a startling variety of  ideas about what makes good reading.
There are people who love a novel, popular or literary according to their tastes and experience, but who don’t read short stories. There are others who read short stories but ‘don’t do poetry’. Why not? What is the difference between an episode in a novel and a short story? A short story and a narrative poem? Alison Lurie once defined it something like this: ‘in a novel, every page must count. In a short story, every sentence must count. In a poem, every word must count.’ Leonard Cohen suggested that a well-written poem is ‘the shortest way of saying something’.
Density and richness are the benchmarks then, and perhaps the reader’s knowledge of how far off the end is. You can get lost in a novel, maybe let a page or two slip past you while your mind is elsewhere but in a short story you need to keep your eye on the ball –  and if you fall asleep halfway through a poem, you’ve missed it.
So if short stories and poems are for people who like to pay attention, and who expect the writer to put something worth finding into every single line, where does that leave us when considering flash fiction? This newly popular form breaking out all over the internet asks the writer to present a story in a few hundred words. Sometimes less than two hundred. Just to be awkward, we tried a competition with a word-limit of sixty.
More than a few people have reacted to flash fiction with contempt. It is, they say, a symptom of the internet-user’s short attention-span, a part of the universal dumbing-down process. Well, I think that depends on the quality of the flash fiction. Here in Misfit Mirror, we present poems, then flash fiction, and finally a traditionally shaped short story. I think each form has its value and its place. Maybe each form demands a different kind of reaction from the reader. What do you think? Please send your views to me, c/o Earlyworks Press, or post on my blog at www.kaygreen.co.uk I will bear them in mind when working on our next anthology.

Misfit Mirror will be published by Earlyworks Press in November 2008, and will be available from www.earlyworkspress.co.uk as well as from libraries and independent bookshops.