On writing, my 100 word flash fiction stories and the great fears of the British public.

I hope somebody out there is enjoying my flash fiction horror stories, I'm certainly enjoying writing them. I am going to try, whenever reasonably possible, to write one every day. I'm doing this to help get me into good practise of writing every day, to hopefully encourage people to regularly view my blog, and also as an exercise to hone my skills.

You'd find, if you really wanted to count, that every one of my flash fiction terror tales is exactly 100 words long; not 99, not 101, precisely 100; a century. To write any kind of story whilst adhering to that rule is challenging, but to send a little frisson of fear through your reader's breast is very difficult indeed. Hopefully I've succeeded in doing that with my stories, or at least in provoking your interest.

Either way, feel free to leave comments. I've set this blog up so anyone can post on it, you don't need to log in with a username/password. Whether you want to lavish me with praise, or unleash a torrent of hellish abuse on me, I want to hear your thoughts!

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An interesting article in today's Independent about a survey conducted on the yougov website to discover the nation's greatest phobia. Fear of heights proved to be number one, which I found rather surprising. In fact, I feel rather cheated that the nation's greatest fear could be something so mundane. Heights? Come on, show some imagination!

A couple of more interesting phobias cropped up in the top 13 (see what they did there?) such as Ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), Hemophobia (fear of blood), but by far the most interesting for me was Coulrophobia, the fear of clowns. Clowns. They are quite macabre and scary beings in many ways, and yet can reduce people to fits of laughter. What does this say about what we find funny and what we find frightening? Is there a very fine line between the two? Is this why many people laugh at those 'home videos' of people falling over, or stand up comedians that single audience members out for abuse? Because they're actually afraid of it happening to them and relieved it's not?

Clowns. Interesting.