In what is easily the fastest turnaround on a story from acceptance to publication, my flash fiction "The Last Centaur, Dying," was accepted yesterday for publication and published this morning. This story came from a prompt on a forum, one of several I've cut back my participation with lately but still visit. On there was a loud-spoken member whose tastes were typically diametrically opposed to my own, and he challenged the other members to write a story based on this picture he'd taken (or perhaps only found, I forget) of Antoine Bourdelle's Dying Centaur statue. Or actually one of them, as Google seems to indicate there are a number of his centaur statues at various locations around the world. I wanted to keep the narrative completely from the perspective of a viewer, as that seemed fitting for the statue, rather than giving the centaur's dying thoughts.
We didn't post the stories at the forum, of course, but he invited us to send them to him, offering some sort of prize, it seems. As I'd expected, he didn't consider mine a favorite, though he did have some kind things to say. I then forgot about the piece I'd written for probably close to two years until I stumbled on it about a month ago, revised it, and sent it to Everyday Weirdness.
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