Now Available: Figments and Fragments, the Best of the 1,000 Word Herd Flash Fiction 2024 Competition
Figments and Fragments, The Best of the 1,000 Word Herd Flash Fiction 2024 Competition is available now! All proceeds of this brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking tales will benefit Trans Lifeline, a grassroots hotline and microgrants 501(c)(3) non-profit organization offering direct emotional and financial support to trans people in crisis – for the trans community, by the trans community. Trans Lifeline provides trans peer support for a community that’s been divested from police since day one.
Figments and Fragments, our 17th charity collection to date, is now available as an ebook. Buy your copy now for 25 winning stories to help fund this amazing charity.
Buy your copy on Amazon via the links below, or search “Figments and Fragments, TL;DR” on your country’s Amazon site!
Thank you to our contributing winners of this collection:
1st place is Creatures of Liquid and Light by Pete Neilsen
2nd place is Two Earthlings by Alexis Ames
3rd place is An Insect Who Dreamed She Was A Woman by Melanie Mulrooney
4th: Seabird by Sarah McPherson
5th: The Good Girl by Jack Lennon
6th: The Last Meeting of the Beaconsville Ladies’ Gardening Society by Jennifer Larson
7th: Nate, Hate, and the Illusory Transformative Nature of Glass by Laura Cody
8th: Switching Tracks by Sally Simon
9th: Hollowing by Elysia Rourke
10th: Costs by Leah Seabrook-Rocha
11th: Breached by Regan Puckett
12th: They’re Out of Michelob Ultra at Malone’s on Twelfth, Si Ellos Son, Si Ellos Son by Joel Shoemaker
13th: Dave, the World’s Smartest Man by Cuyler Meade
14th: Hollow Promise by Aalisha Green
15th: When Darkness Falls by Josephine Queen
16th: Malfeasance by Ej Sidle
17th: Horseshoes by Abi Hennig
18th: Because That’s What Heroes Do by Kari Maaren
19th: The Ballad of the Annoying Bard and the Stoic Paladin: A Tale of Music, Muscles and Merriment by Morgan West
20th: Repatriation of Tongues by Anne Meale
21st: The Impact of Gravity on Wilhelm Lehmann: Globe-Trotting Gnome, Lippmann Industries by Jo Spicer
22nd: The Life and Death of Daffodil Princess by Jeremiah Wells
23rd: An Unlikely Prophet by Lin Morris
24th: Moving On by MM Schreier
25th: The Last Thread by A. Reid Johnson
How we got here
We began in March 2024 with a call to writers to enter our third annual flash fiction competition: The 1,000 Word Herd Flash fiction Competition. We chose a competition to help support our non-profit press financially, showcase some wonderful writers, and to help fund our charity of choice, Trans Lifeline Plus. Participants seemed to have a great time last year and we loved making it happen!
This year we had our returning panel of six judges selected from TL;DR Press’s founders and editors, as well as the all-powerful Overseer to manage contact with our entrants, assign all of the stories, and generally make sure everything ran smoothly.
We were utterly blown away by the quality of the submissions to the competition! To say that it was incredibly difficult to narrow down our top 25 favourites would be an understatement. Had we the budget, we could easily have made a great collection with twice the amount of winners. So many of the entrants delivered wonderful and innovative ideas from across the genres and styles, and built on their prompts in ways that we couldn’t have imagined. It was an inspirational month and a half of judging, and we couldn’t be more grateful to all the writers who competed!
Our judges read all of the stories that we received, wrote detailed feedback to every entry, and compiled our shortlist of 25 stories. All stories were kept anonymous to the judges until after we locked in the winning stories.
Making sure that everyone who entered the competition got useful, detailed feedback was incredibly important to us. This year, we produced over 30,000 words of feedback for our entrants!
We were extremely pleased to announce Creatures of Liquid and Light by Pete Neilsen as our winner in July.
We want to thank the wonderful #tldrwriters and #1KWHC communities for your stories and support while we read your work and selected our winners. This collection is the work of hundreds of hours, and we’re so pleased to share with the world!
Thank you to everyone who entered the competition for your wonderful stories. We sincerely hope you enjoyed being a part of this project.
Thank you to our judges!
Hannah Hulbert, Mia Moss, Jenna Harvie, Joe Butler, Penfold, and Callum Rowland.
Thank you to our Overseer and Head of Production!
Alex Laurel Lanz
Thank you to our Cover Illustrator!
Joe Butler
How to support our release:
1. Buy our collection in eBook! US | Canada | UK
2. Retweet our big news and tag @TLDRpress!
3. Share with your friends, family, and followers in person or online.
4. Rate and review our collection on Amazon.
Watch out for more news about our next call for submissions, as well as workshops, resources, and more! Want to stay in the loop? Follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, subscribe to our newsletter, and join our Slack writing group.