I’ve documented elsewhere my ‘long, painful journey from long fiction to short.” You can read that link if you want.

There have been two important people on bypath to writing short fiction. I’ve talked about one of them, Janet Reid, many times. The literary agent who gave so much of her time to helping aspiring authors to write well and understand the business, her legacy and footprint in the traditional publishing industry is hard to quantify. As well as her blog, where she hosted flash fiction contests, and gave very public and useful feedback, she also ran Query Shark, which gave immeasurable assistance to querying authors.

The other person who I want to talk about is one who even I don’t know as much about: Alex F. Fayle. He is (or was. I’m not sure he’s still alive) a Canadian, born not far from me. But what I can see on GoodReads is that he hasn’t published anything since 2013. I ‘met’ him in 2015. His website, as listed on GoodReads, no longer exists. There is an author named Alex Fayle who has a website and a pattern, but I’m not sure they’re the same person.

So, given all this, why is Alex Faye important to me?

Janet Reid taught me how to write flash fiction. Alex F. Fayle published it.

He led a little, now defunct, project called SpeckLit. It published one 100-word story (a drabble) as day. In mid-2015, after I’d written many, many drabbles, I picked six and sent them to him for consideration. He bought four. I was shocked. He paid 5¢ a word ($5 per drabble, not including title).

This was insanely important to me. I was so close to just quitting writing all together, and boom, I had four semi-professional sales.

In early 2016, I submitted another six, and he bought two. Six of my first stories sold were all to one market (which may not be ideal) in one specific format. My seventh, Last Breath Day, was to a professional market at full professional rates. I never would’ve made that seventh sale if I didn’t have the confidence and validation from those first six.

So, with all the times I’ve thanked Janet, I’d like to thank Alex here and now.

Sadly, SpeckLit ceased publishing in 2016, and the site is now gone.

Fortunately, I kept screenshots of my six stories, and even better, I recently found them.