Who is Ed Broom?

Ed Broom works in IT but tells his kids that he’s a lighthouse keeper. In 2007 he won the inaugural Ip-art Short Story contest and has been trying to capture that feeling ever since. He lives in Ipswich, Suffolk, and will do most things for a bag of marshmallows, preferably Rocky Mountain.

Ed won the 2014 Let’s Talk Short Story competition. Read his excellent (semi-autobiographical?!) winning entry, A Few May Yet Be Saved.

Check out Ed’s website www.freston.net (be careful, you could get lost in here for days), or follow him on Twitter.

I asked Ed about his Micro Bookends 1.01 winning story (Ed has very kindly agreed to judge this week’s contest, so pay attention):

So, great story. How did you get there from the prompt and bookends? Too kind! Max Born introduced me to his physics buddies and the Nobel Prize, and it fell into place once Bob Hope agreed to compere.

100 words ain’t many. How do you fit a story into so few words? Write, edit, cut. Be brutal. Rinse & repeat.

Why do you like flash fiction? One side of paper equals my attention span.

Been writing long? Fiction since 2007.

You write anything else? Blogging since 2000. These days mostly cafe reviews and, er, write-ups of ping pong games {MB: go read some. Seriously, go read some.}

Any advice for other flash writers? Force the reader to figure out what’s going on.

Any interesting writerly projects in the pipeline? To paraphrase Steven Wright: “I’m writing a novella. I’ve got the page numbers done.”

I just finished reading a book. Can you recommend another? The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi.