Hold the front page

Metazen ‘likes odd stories and odd poems, but ones that touch you in a special way’ which is why a few weeks ago I sent them one of my few attempts at flash fiction, just on the off-chance.  Since  I prefer writing to length (2,000 – 80,000!) and don’t usually put my writing in a particularly edgy or unconventional category, I wasn’t too surprised or disapppointed (well no more than usual) when  a polite rejection came back.  I was a lot more surprised  when another email arrived this morning saying there had been a change of plan. Apparently ‘Design Flaw’ had been the wrong length   – but now they needed something of just that size, and so here it is on the front page.  

For those who are interested, the story came about after a training day in Swindon (yes, I used to do these things) when I returned by train under the influence of quite a lot of caffeine and had that slightly surreal  experience of being outside looking in on my fellow passengers.  Since then (around two years ago) it has had one brief outing as ‘Brain Drain’ but otherwise lain dormant until I saw Metazen mentioned by a fellow Tweeter.  For some reason I changed the title and made it, fortuitously, just a little shorter. So it’s thanks again to Twitter (and Great Western trains)  for making me a Metazen writer after all.