June Flash Fiction Challenge

By Renee Miller

Consider a typical day in your life. What do you do? Where do you go? What is it about your day that is unlike anyone else’s? Nothing? Believe it or not, there is something intriguing about the mundane, the ordinary. Enthral us with your regular Joe on a regular day.

With the right spin, a writer can make cleaning a toilet fascinating.

For example, Open Book’s writer in residence Jessica Westhead’s book, And Also Sharks, includes many tales that are essentially about ordinary people going about their lives. What makes her stories exceptional is Westhead’s ability to create characters that leap off the page while injecting subtle bits of humour and intrigue here and there. Each story is twisted just enough to keep you turning the page. Some of them even offer the reader something to think about long after “the end.”

July’s challenge is to write a story about a day in the life of…anyone you choose. It might be you, your neighbour or the vampire that lives up the road in that lovely new subdivision; anyone. The key is to make the ordinary extraordinary.

Now to the technicalities:

Stories must be a maximum of 500 words, and written in first person POV. Submit by midnight (Eastern Time) July 15th, 2011. Late entries will not be read. Challenges are open to all countries but must be unpublished, original works.

Please send all entries with the submission pasted into the body of your email (no attachments please) to submissions@openbooktoronto.com. Include your name, pen name (if using one), your email and the title of your entry. In the subject line please write “Open Book July Writing Submission”. The winning submission will be published in Open Book: Toronto.

Renee Miller has written fiction in one form or another since she could hold a pen. She has written for a local newspaper and freelances for several online sites including two pages spotlighting writing and publishing in Canada. Renee also moderates a fiction writing group of about 1100 members and two Canadian literature and writing groups on Goodreads.com. She lives in Tweed, Ontario with her two children and a lucky man who insists he is not her husband.