72 Postcards Project

Postcard Fiction or short fiction are known for their extreme brevity. One would think short fiction was a self explanatory term. However, there are many different categories of short fiction based on word count, though these labels are arbitrary. Here's a rough cataloging:

Sudden Fiction, 1500 word
Flash Fiction, 1000 word
Micro Fiction, 300 word
Drabble, 100 words
Nanofiction, 55 words
Twitterature (Twitter Fiction), 140 characters, about 23 words

In the 1970s, a science fiction magazine editor, George Hay, presented a challenge to Arthur C. Clarke to write a short story that fit on a postcard, a micro fiction approximately 250 to 300 words long. The result was Arthur C. Clarke's micro fiction "Quarantine" which is 188 words. 

It just so happens that in the course of minimizing my life by slowly dismantling my scrapbooks and digitizing the contents, I am now left with 72 postcards from a 1998 trip to England. They are perfectly good postcards and I could use them to write notes to friends and family but it feels weird to send a UK postcard from within the US. 

I've decided to assign myself  the 72 Postcards Project and write microfictions to mail out into the world. I'll also publish the Postcard Fictions on the SummerTroll blog.