Curios Now Available: Best of the 1,000 Word Herd Flash Fiction 2023 Competition
Curios, The Best of the 1,000 Word Herd Flash Fiction 2023 Competition is a collection of brilliant, funny, and heartbreaking tales to 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.
Curios, our 15th charity collection to date, is now available as an ebook here. Buy your copy now for 24 winning stories to help fund this amazing charity.
Buy your copy on Amazon via the links below, or search “Curios, TL;DR” on your country’s Amazon site!
Thank you to our contributing winners of this collection:
1st place is Nine Lives of Madness by MM Schreier
2nd place is When by Lyle Enright
3rd place is Lucky Numbers by Justin Creps
4th: And One Hard One by Ezra Fox
5th: Perfect Balance by Gregory Lawrence
6th: Hermit Hallie Finds Her Wings by Regan Puckett
7th: Sugar and Spice by Maria Brekke
8th: Red Cedar Timbre by Alexandra Otto
9th: The Blue Kitchen by Alyssa Beatty
10th: Cinnamon and Turmeric by K. Z. Richards
11th: Salt-Crust Heart by Mason Yeater
12th: The truth is in the letters by Alex Grehy
13th: Not Mark and Me by Kay Sandry
14th: When Comes the Tide by Joanna McLaughlin
15th: Ghostly Business by E.M. Wright
16th: Unplanned Schedule Adjustment by Margaret Hanson
17th: Swimming Down His Arm by Nathan James
18th: Language Barrier by Steven Patchett
19th: The Calling of the Wolves by Laila Miller
20th: A Hook Called Starlight by Bryan Arneson
21st: Wait for the Ending by Chrissie Rohrman
22nd: The Cat Who Drank Too Much Coffee by Ryan Walraven
23rd: The Crescent City Trail 10k by Darcie Johnson
24th: Love Talker by Mary Lawton
How we got here
We began in March 2023 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 24 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 24 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 20,000 words of feedback for our entrants!
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 Colback.
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:
- Buy our collection in eBook! US | Canada | UK
- Retweet our big news and tag @TLDRpress!
- Share with your friends, family, and followers in person or online.
- 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.