It has been a while, but time for something new! Our monthly flash fiction may have gone away due to lack of participation, but we met a lot of great authors during it’s run. One of them had the distinction of entering nearly every month and often right under the deadline wire. He won more than a few of them. Such dedication deserves to be rewarded. Coming in August, a brand-new flash fiction collection by author Chrisopher J. Burke!

Who says there’s never enough time anymore?

Help yourself to twenty tales of wit and wonder for those with but a little time to read. Pick up Christopher J. Burke’s debut collection of award-winning flash fiction for a quick trip through the whimsical to magical to speculative and back again.

A space-traveling hustler gets taken,
but can’t bring himself to mind in the afterglow.

Playing fetch takes a darker turn as a man who hears dogs’ thoughts
encounters a hellhound.

A disturbing young man brings a whole new meaning
to the term ‘writer’s block.’

With the edges of the galaxy to explore,
solitary confinement is more than worth doing extra time.

A young visionary is on to a hot new idea,
but it takes an outside perspective to give it a brilliant spin.

And many more fantastic tales to transport you
for just a moment or two…there and back again In a Flash!

Christopher J. Burke is a writer, high school math teacher, and webcomic creator. He’s also a gamer and fan of science fiction who has been telling stories since he was little. This combination ultimately led to his first professional sale, “Don’t Kill the Messenger,” in Autoduel Quarterly. This was followed by the creation of a fiction fanzine, Driving Tigers Magazine, with stories set in the Car Wars universe of Steve Jackson Games, which had a five-issue run. Thanks to his knowledge and love of that game, he was asked to co-author GURPS Autoduel, 2^nd edition for Steve Jackson Games.

He took time off from writing when he switched careers and went back to school to become a teacher. But not before he completed a goal of having a humor piece published in MAD Magazine.

In 2007, he started the math-based webcomic, (x, why?), filled with the kind of geeky humor that makes his students groan when he includes them in the daily lesson. The comic still updates with new strips every week on his blog. 

After a chance meeting at a launch party in 2014, Christopher was once again bitten by the writing bug and started producing flash fiction. He won several of the monthly flash fiction contests on the eSpec Books website, and appeared in their anthology, In a Flash 2016.

Christopher lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Antoinette.