52FF ~ review
I have not yet met Marc Nash author of 52FF, but I will have no trouble spotting him when I do as he will be the one with the 1,000 word stare of the flash fictionalist. He will, it being the nature of the beast, either be coming down from nailing his latest ff or prepping to write his next.
Flash fiction seems the perfect genre, if that be what it is, for our times. You have an idea. You nail it. Forget beginning-middle-end, as to plan wld not be flash. We txt n tweet our lives into the real time river of whatever. Your flash fictionalist just grabs the raw juice and adds another 990 words to make it into a chunk of art. Is it a big poem? Nope. Is is a tiny novel? Nope. It's a stretched heartbeat of nowness, about a hundred tweets say. Those of us who can't live by txts n tweets alone, who crave more, but are super impatient and either unwill or incapable of reading a 100,000 novel should find the 1,000 word flash a perfect solution. You can flash read. You can take 1,000 words in a few minutes. You don't have to give up half your day. You don't have to work your way into it. Read. Change tubes. Read another. Move on.
To hold the flash reader's attention the flash fictionalist needs must to be nimble.
Marc Nash's creative intellect is exactly that ~ nimble.
I have so far read 17 of the stories in 52FF and can you assure you of this. Marc Nash is a writer who commands great originality in his choice of subject matter, great wit, great sensitivity and, this above all, great dexterity in his skill with da werds. He loves the the sheer pleasure of being in the creative spectrum in the wordfall. But this embellishment never gets in the way of the story, the mood, or whatever each fiction is about, but adds another reason for enjoying the read. My overall impression was of strong contemporay intelligence in full flow. We can learn from Marc Nash's fictions and perhaps adjust our own lives for the better.
I won't spoil your enjoyment of his stories by revealing any of the subjects but I will give you a couple of exmaples of his wording which caught my eye.
(Contemplating a lover who has left) "A labyrinth of hidden plumbing .. how she must still reside there, little tiny shards and spoors of hair, nails and other off-cuts. .. She persecutes me from within the pipes, blow-darting me to a slow ruin."
(A woman studying the elbow of her sleeping lover) "There you could witness the celluar architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. .. Tiny parallelograms .. The shifting orchestration was simply divine."
(An aged actress in her dressing room) "...her own mind's bulbs popped one by one .. no unseen stage hand in her head to replace the burned out filaments."
I love this sort of writing. I am happy when I find one such passage in 50 pages. But I kept coming across such passages ever few pages in 52FF.
I will return to dip into 52FF. And I know exactly how I will do so. I will come back at moments of disappointment, when I am stuck with something, at moments when I need a lift. Because I know that every third or second offering in 52FF will deliver a jold of some some true nourishment to refresh my jaded palette.
Ron Askew ~ Watching Swifts
Flash fiction seems the perfect genre, if that be what it is, for our times. You have an idea. You nail it. Forget beginning-middle-end, as to plan wld not be flash. We txt n tweet our lives into the real time river of whatever. Your flash fictionalist just grabs the raw juice and adds another 990 words to make it into a chunk of art. Is it a big poem? Nope. Is is a tiny novel? Nope. It's a stretched heartbeat of nowness, about a hundred tweets say. Those of us who can't live by txts n tweets alone, who crave more, but are super impatient and either unwill or incapable of reading a 100,000 novel should find the 1,000 word flash a perfect solution. You can flash read. You can take 1,000 words in a few minutes. You don't have to give up half your day. You don't have to work your way into it. Read. Change tubes. Read another. Move on.
To hold the flash reader's attention the flash fictionalist needs must to be nimble.
Marc Nash's creative intellect is exactly that ~ nimble.
I have so far read 17 of the stories in 52FF and can you assure you of this. Marc Nash is a writer who commands great originality in his choice of subject matter, great wit, great sensitivity and, this above all, great dexterity in his skill with da werds. He loves the the sheer pleasure of being in the creative spectrum in the wordfall. But this embellishment never gets in the way of the story, the mood, or whatever each fiction is about, but adds another reason for enjoying the read. My overall impression was of strong contemporay intelligence in full flow. We can learn from Marc Nash's fictions and perhaps adjust our own lives for the better.
I won't spoil your enjoyment of his stories by revealing any of the subjects but I will give you a couple of exmaples of his wording which caught my eye.
(Contemplating a lover who has left) "A labyrinth of hidden plumbing .. how she must still reside there, little tiny shards and spoors of hair, nails and other off-cuts. .. She persecutes me from within the pipes, blow-darting me to a slow ruin."
(A woman studying the elbow of her sleeping lover) "There you could witness the celluar architecture of the human body in all its intricacy. .. Tiny parallelograms .. The shifting orchestration was simply divine."
(An aged actress in her dressing room) "...her own mind's bulbs popped one by one .. no unseen stage hand in her head to replace the burned out filaments."
I love this sort of writing. I am happy when I find one such passage in 50 pages. But I kept coming across such passages ever few pages in 52FF.
I will return to dip into 52FF. And I know exactly how I will do so. I will come back at moments of disappointment, when I am stuck with something, at moments when I need a lift. Because I know that every third or second offering in 52FF will deliver a jold of some some true nourishment to refresh my jaded palette.
Ron Askew ~ Watching Swifts
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