A couple of months’ back I was one of 1500 people to submit a story to Fortnum and Mason’s short story competition. I did not win (otherwise I wouldn’t be able to publish the story of my blog, duh), but I have learnt a valuable lesson: I am not a short fiction writer, and that’s OK. My shortest fiction is 1000-1200 words, which gives me enough space to explore the details I love and feel a sense of completion.
The prompt I chose was “On a cold autumn night, one of Britain’s smallest villages will become the country’s most infamous, with the perplexing disappearance of all its inhabitants”, which was linked to their whisky chocolate. Of course. Because of the requirement that the story started with the prompt, I had to edit the draft you find below into something I didn’t like much, and I already wasn’t very keen on the original story because I had a 500 words word-count and felt it ended abruptly, but I wasn’t too keen on removing what, in my opinion, makes something nice to read. So, yeah, I am not a short fiction person. Sorry. If you’d like to read the short story, though, here it is, with no words cut to fit an arbitrary number or anything.
