I created this site back in 2004 to support my book Flash Writing: How to Write, Revise and Publish Stories Less Than 1000 Words Long.  I always intended for it to be a destination for everything surrounding writing flash fiction. Filled with articles for writing flash fiction (of which there were very few of back in 2004), market listings, and other interesting info about the writing life.

It never happened. Life got in the way. That and my less-than-stellar website design skills proved to be a barrier to keeping the site updated and full of useful content.  I didn’t really know what to do with the site, so I renewed the domain year after year, felt guilty and disappointed in myself for failing to make it what I always wanted it to be: a portal to all things related to writing really short stories and articles.

I started the Grist for the Muse blog in 2006, designed to take the place of the monthly e-newsletter I sent out to former students and friends and struggled with, but eventually came to like using the Blogger format to occasionally post items of interest to my followers. Slowly, I focused the theme of the blog to be that of generating creative sparks for writers by identifying interesting ideas, inspirational books, and weekly writing prompts to get you writing and keep you writing.

Another issue that I’ve always struggled with, and have found that most of my students and workshop attendees struggle with as well; finding time to write, evolved into the 15-Minute Writer blog, which focuses on time saving tips, new writing techniques and tools to help busy writers find ways to squeeze writing time into their days, conquer the inner critic and resistance in order to get the writing done.

Through these blogs, I got comfortable with the blogging format and wanted to apply it to the Flash Writing site. All along I’ve been hearing about WordPress and how it was fantastic for blogging and setting up websites for writers. So I finally loaded it and have spent the last 3 months learning how it works, tweaking the design, creating a new logo and figuring out how to make this blog format my own.

So here it goes. This post is the first step to bringing the site in line (at last) with my original vision of what the Flash Writing site was supposed to be all those years ago.