old craft article featuring my micro "little Darling"

I'd forgotten the craft article by Cathy Ulrich that Grant Faulkner posted today in the Flash Fiction Institute newsletter.  It's apparently included in FFI's craft essay archives.

Here's what Cathy Ulrich said about my micro "Little Darling" in the "ABCs of Flash Writing: Q is for Quiet" in SPRY:
   
     Look at Jacqueline Doyle’s powerhouse story in Wigleaf, Little Darling.
     Her opening lines:  It was my idea. Not his.
    Those five little words. Only one of them has more than one syllable.     There is a story in those words, and in the quiet between them.
     The best flash writers are the ones playing the rests, letting the readers fill in those moments of silence with their own music, their own story.
     Master those quiet moments, those unsaid things. Your writing will be stronger for it.

That micro is probably mentioned more often than any of my others. (Grant devotes a couple of pages to it in his book THE ART OF BREVITY.) I remember workshopping the micro in my San Francisco writing group, where a new member with a book forthcoming from Sarabande really hated it. Somehow in those days I was able to insist on my vision and ignore criticism I didn't feel was merited. Now, not so much. Maybe because I'm not writing so well? At any rate I'm feeling discouraged.

Discouraged even though I got a soft reject today from a great journal that actually asked me to send something else now rather than in some unspecified future. (Especially nice because I'm struggling to write a similar soft reject at CRAFT and wasn't sure how to word it. We haven't done one like that before.)

Upcoming events: I'll participate in a group reading for the launch of  Sasha Vasilyuk's novel in paperback at the Sycamore in San Francisco on November 4. Should be fun. And I rescheduled my Flash Fiction Institute course for January 18, changed the format to a two-hour workshop. No idea whether I'll get enough students. This week's workshop at the Flash Fiction Institute (by a popular writer with a new book) was canceled for low enrollment.