Tag: flash fiction and radio

Broadcast News, Broadcast Hiccups, and Birthdays

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Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated with many created in Book Brush. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes.
Hope you had a great weekend. I had a fabulous 60th birthday celebration with family and friends – Lady was exhausted too by the end of it. A huge thank you for all the good wishes which have come in too.

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Good news. I’ve heard from Hannah Kate that her Spring Equinox show on North Manchester FM, which was due to be broadcast on Saturday, will now be broadcast this evening, 24th March 2026 from 7 pm to 9 pm. The link below, I’m told, will still work for this.

Huge congratulations to fellow ACW member, Rosemary Johnson, whose story is on the show, along with my one, Out With The Old.

It is ironic perhaps I’m out later so will almost certainly have to use the wonderful Listen Again feature later this week to hear the stories but do tune in as and when you can. I always love listening to all of the stories on these shows. The range is amazing and, of course, they all have to be flash fiction to fit in with broadcasting requirements.

North Manchester FM: Hannah’s Bookshelf Spring Equinox Special, Saturday 21 March, 2-4pm


Hope your week has got off to a reasonable start. Delighted to have my statement through from the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS). Good result and up on last year so am very pleased. Many thanks to Wendy H Jones for flagging this up. I’ve been a member of ALCS for years as it comes with my Society of Authors membership. Do check them out if you have work out there with an ISBN or ISSN on them. It is a superb way of helping authors.

Don’t forget it won’t be long before my next author newsletter comes out. To sign up for hints, tips, stories and more do head over to my landing page at https://allisonsymescollectedworks.com

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A huge thank you for the many birthday greetings coming my way thanks to my hitting the big 60 today. Much appreciated. I can’t quite believe it either. Had a lovely time yesterday with family and friends. Today is recovery time! (Lady had a ball with her chum, Lily. Lady slept very well last night!).

Writing wise, I’ll be sharing Templates on Chandler’s Ford Today this coming Friday. I use them often and they can help so much with character creation and in helping you to “see” your setting in your own mind even if you don’t share most of that with your readers. I hope the post will be useful.

Am also looking forward to the next meeting of the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction group next week.

Hope to get back to drafting short stories for competitions from next weekend.

Unfortunately there were technical issues on Hannah Kate’s show yesterday so the Spring Equinox show did not go out as planned. I understand this will be redone at a later date and I will share further details when I get them. Tech is wonderful when it works! Update:  See above. Programme rescheduled for 24th March 2026.

Delighted my Out With the Old will be broadcast by Hannah Kate on her Spring Equinox show on North Manchester FM today. Many congratulations to all of the featured authors. Flash is wonderful for broadcast and Open Prose Mic Nights precisely because they don’t take too long while retaining the challenge of ensuring listeners are engaged with a gripping story line and characters.

There is a Listen Again feature on the station, which I will be making use of as, when my tale goes out, I will be busy partying with family and friends ahead of my 60th birthday tomorrow. It’s all go. Sadly, things went wrong but the show was rebroadcast on 24th March 2026 instead.

North Manchester FM: Hannah’s Bookshelf Spring Equinox Special, Saturday 21 March, 2-4pm

Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

My story, Out With The Old, will now be broadcast on Hannah Kate’s Spring Equinox show this evening on North Manchester FM – 24th March. I look forward to listening to it and the other tales in due course.

Flash works well for radio as it doesn’t take long and has immediate impact as does radio itself, of course. I also love taking part in Open Prose Mic Nights when I can especially at The Writers’ Summer School, Swanwick, because you can get immediate feedback from the audience reaction as to how something went down with them.

Trust me, this is useful, and I’ve used the feedback I’ve had here to hone stories further. I think the tricky bit is getting the mood of the stories right for the occasion. For Swanwick with the five minutes maximum reading time, I like to read something punchy, something funny, something reflective. I think it makes for a good balance of moods and is a great way to showcase what flash can be.

It’s Monday. As ever it’s been hectic. Time to wind down with a flash story then. Hope you like my latest on YouTube – The Blame Game.

Well, just who IS to blame when food goes missing at a party? Find out here.

 

22nd March
I celebrate my 60th birthday today, not quite believing where the time has gone. I’ll be setting some sixty word exercises for the Association of Christian Writers Flash Fiction Group next week. Think three short paragraphs and you’re there. It’s a good challenge!

I haven’t come across any competitions for this word count (I have come across 53, 75 etc) but these short pieces are excellent for sharing on your social media and website. They give a good taster of your writing style and make for an excellent “warm up” exercise ahead of longer writing work.

Also birthdays are useful for looking back at times past as well as ahead to the future and good story ideas can come from those thoughts.

Hope your weekend is going well. Busy one here as I am about to celebrate my 60th birthday (22nd March) with friends and family today. Lady will have a fabulous time and be happily shattered later. She loves family get togethers especially as she will meet up with another family dog with whom she gets on very well.

Birthdays and other celebrations can be an excellent idea to write stories about. Who goes to what event? Who doesn’t get invited (there are consequences – think the wicked fairy in Sleeping Beauty here)? What happens at the event itself? Good story ideas there and they can be funny, tragic, dramatic, depending on your characters.


Goodreads Author Blog – Birthdays and Other Celebrations in Books

Birthdays and other celebrations can make a great backdrop in a story. I always think of Bilbo Baggins’ event at the beginning of The Lord of the Rings. Here, it was used as a way for him to “disappear” without anyone seeming to notice. Frodo does, of course, and this sets in motion his own huge quest.

Birthdays can show up what other characters think of the celebrant. The birthday person can also use their event to make a point and that could set other things in motion. The event can also be where a murder or other crime takes place too. Nobody said these things have to be happy events!

Also reaching a certain age can set things in motion as they did for Harry Potter when he reached his eleventh birthday.

Other celebrations would include the ball where Elizabeth Bennet meets Mr Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. It would not be something either of them would see as celebratory at the time but it did have a powerful impact on both of them.

It’s also lovely to see this kind of event in fiction at all because fiction does reflect life and birthdays are very much a part of that.

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Publication/Broadcast News and Author Newsletters

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Image Credits:-
All images from Pixabay/Pexels unless otherwise stated with many created in Book Brush. Book cover images from Chapeltown Books and Bridge House Publishing. Screenshots taken by me, Allison Symes.
Hope you had a good weekend. Great start to the week with publication and ALCS payment news. Lady got her week off to a cracking start by having a good run round with her Hungarian Vizler and Rhodesian Ridgeback pals. Hope the rest of the week continues to go well. Spotting more spring flowers out too. They cheer me up so much. I love the colours.

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Hope you have had a good day. Glad to share a Mixcloud link to Hannah Kate’s Spring Equinox show on North Manchester FM on Saturday. Always easier to share one link rather than two! (I had shared two links to both halves of the show over the weekend but will only share this one link here). It was great fun taking part in the flash fiction slot here and do check out the other stories. They were a good mix. Hannah’s Bookshelf is on every Saturday between 2 and 4 pm. If you like books, stories, and radio, well here is the show for you!

Separately, I will be talking about the joys of PowerPoint for Chandler’s Ford Today on Friday. Will be sharing tips and what I’ve found useful here.

Screenshot 2024-03-19 at 10-01-58 Hannah’s Bookshelf Spring Equinox Special - 16_03_2024

Busy night tonight. (18th March 2024 – you know how you sometimes get several things on one day, mine this week was Monday!). First post. Delighted to say I am back on CafeLit with a story called Zoom. Hope you enjoy it. Oh and I will leave you to decide if the character in this one could be in any way related to yours truly!

Screenshot 2024-03-18 at 16-52-14 CafeLitMagazineSecond post. (Told you Monday, 18th March 2024 was busy for me!). Glad to share my latest Authors Electric post where I discuss Author Newsletters. I discuss how I approach writing mine and share some tips. Hope you find it useful.

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Hope you are having a lovely weekend. Pleased to see some sun this afternoon.

Will be back on Authors Electric tomorrow, talking about Author Newsletters. Will also have a story on CafeLit tomorrow. Gets the week off to a good start! See above. I like Mondays like Monday 18th March – lots happening!

Listening to Danse Macabre by Camille Saint-Saens on Classic FM as I write this. (Well, I had been!). One of my favourite pieces, I always vote for it in their hall of fame chart. Also used a free to use version of it for the book trailer for From Light to Dark and Back Again. It is apt!

Am busy preparing some wonderful author interviews to go on Chandler’s Ford Today in due course.
It was lovely listening to Budding Betrayal on North Manchester FM live yesterday. I often have to use catch up but it was great listening to the variety of tales, all of which were spring related in some way, and it made a nice change to get to do so at the time of broadcast.

Writing Tip: I regularly have brainstorming sessions where I jot down potential ideas for titles, opening and closing lines, and so on. This is great and I find it so useful. But what do you do when the brain decides now would be a good time to give you a fabulous idea to write up but you are not in a position to write anything? I sometimes find this when I go swimming. It’s not a great time for inspiration to strike.

All I do here is repeat the idea to myself (silently!) until I can get to my phone and type myself up a quick note. I can then flesh that note out further when I have more time. What matters is getting the nugget of the idea down. Do that and you should find it will remind you of what else you thought about and then you can jot it down.

431477653_10161784215797053_7292184455729948731_nHope you have had a good day. Delighted to hear my story Budding Betrayal on North Manchester FM in Hannah Kate’s Spring Equinox show this afternoon. Many congratulations to the other four writers who had stories on. It was a great mixture of tales! All of the stories are on the second half of the show. See single Mixcloud link further up.

What I do when I’m thinking of submitting something for broadcast is edit my story and then I record it on Zoom. I can then play it back and hear how it sounds but I can also check my timings. For Hannah Kate’s show, you send in your stories via Voicemail and you have three minutes maximum on this so your timing does have to be spot on.

As with Open Prose Mic Nights, getting your timing right is crucial but Zoom helps you here. It is also fine to come in at under the maximum time. It is never okay to go over. Word count, I find, for a three minutes slot like today’s one is usually around the 250 mark but it always pays to check as you need to allow for your own reading time here.

The playback is helpful again because I can hear whether I come across clearly or not. No garbling, rushing, or big gaps here. I also find reading out loud and playing a recording back is also great practice for future Mic Nights. Nothing to dislike here basically.

And do enjoy the stories!

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Facebook – From Light to Dark and Back Again

I don’t always name a character in my flash tales. (I always do for my longer short stories). I sometimes do this as leaving a character as an “it” can be more scary if I’m writing a darker flash piece. But at other times the name is not the most important thing about the character. Their attitude and back story is more important to know.

An example of this is my The Past – Ready or Not? from Tripping the Flash Fantastic. The story slowly reveals what you do need to know about my character but the name didn’t matter at all!

Most of the time I do name characters of course and use those names to help readers picture them but it isn’t always needed. It is a case of knowing why you are doing (or in this case NOT doing) something which matters most. There has to be a good reason for anything to be in a story.

433567827_10161787404767053_8155201244053768680_nIt’s Monday. Finally the evenings are getting lighter for longer. Having said that, it is still Monday. Time for a story then. Hope you enjoy my latest YouTube flash tale – Next Time. Dog owners especially will relate to this one.


When I have a theme set for a competition, I take some time working out what could come from that theme. It pays. I find the first few ideas are the “obvious” ones but as I write down more possible thoughts, I find I come up with something which isn’t so obvious. I will then explore those ideas further and see if there is anything I can do with them. Often there is and I will go down this route, knowing I’m producing a story which fits the theme but, hopefully, will stand out a bit as being “different”.

If you’re going for the more obvious takes on a theme, think about what would make your characters stand out in that story. What is it unique to you which you can bring to the mix here? A striking character can transform an “obvious” storyline.

But the time taken to work out ideas, I’ve found, has saved me considerable time and grief later. When I pick the idea to write up, I already know I have thought it through, worked out any potential issues with it, and then I get on with the first draft.

431465653_10161784218007053_4015866457362570123_nGood to hear flash fiction on the radio. I enjoyed tuning in to Hannah Kate’s Spring Equinox show on North Manchester FM this afternoon (16th March 2024) and hearing five flash pieces, including my Budding Betrayal, broadcast.

Flash works well on radio. Flash has to keep to the point and to word counts. That in turn helps with timings (crucial for radio shows). When I do need a scene break in my flash tale, and I did with Budding Betrayal, I use a slight pause to indicate a change of scene is coming. Only way you can do it but it does have to be a brief pause, otherwise folk will think there’s something wrong.

All dialogue stories would work well on radio but you do need to find a way of distinguishing between your characters. Yes, you can use names but it is also handy to have one character speak in a specific way and another character to speak in another. You can use turns of phrase to good effect here.

If one character in a two character tale uses a certain word or two, we will know who they are just by the use of those words. We will also know who the other character has to be by default because they won’t use them.

For flash with its tight word count, it would pay to ensure any turn of phrase is kept short and it should be repeated (ideally once or twice maximum depending on your word count here) but, as with any good writing, it pays not to overdo it. I think flash helps here. It forces you to keep things tight. Repetition is used as a deliberately chosen effect (which to my mind is the best way to use it at all).

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Goodreads Author Blog – Dialogue in Fiction

One thing writers need to be aware of is dialogue in fiction can’t match exactly what we come up with in life. Well, nobody wants to read lots of hesitations, repetitions which are not done for effect (and look like mistakes by the author), info dumps and so on. So dialogue in fiction has to “tidy up” what we would come up for real. Dialogue in fiction has to serve the needs of the characters (and, even more importantly, the readers).

The truly great stories get this spot on. You can imagine the characters speaking. What are they saying moves the story on and you are gripped by their conversation. That is the purpose of fictional dialogue.
Dialogue in fiction serves many purposes. It shares information. It reveals information from one character to another which furthers the plot. But whatever the intention of the author here, the dialogue must make us want to read on.

As readers, we need to be convinced by the dialogue the writer is sharing with us. (We have to be convinced this is what characters, as portrayed, would say if they were real).

I love writing dialogue. What I have to watch is to ensure I am putting dialogue into a story for a good reason. I could easily get my characters into conversational ping-pong. So what I do to ensure I don’t do this is ask what does this dialogue do for the story? If it helps in any way, which it should do, it stays in. Else it gets cut.

Great fictional dialogue shows you so much about the characters. In the Wodehouse stories, I can’t imagine Jeeves and Wooster speaking in any other way. The way the two speak (generally and to each other) confirms their portrayal and is so wonderfully done. That’s just to name one example.

Agatha Christie is consistent with how she gets Poirot and Miss Marple to speak. That matters too.

Consistency confirms characterisation. It is what we expect from the characters we like and loathe.

Character dialogue adds so much to the stories and books I enjoy, when done correctly. It acts as a good challenge for me to get it right with my characters too!

Screenshot 2024-03-16 at 17-34-46 Dialogue in FictionWRITERS NARRATIVE SUBSCRIBER LINK

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