Hello, Okay Donkey fans! We’re so glad you’re here.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, winter is really wintering — and it’s not even winter for another few weeks. Your own newsletter author lives in the northern U.S., where over the weekend they lived the Pinterest-aesthetic dream of working in a library as a foot of snow fell outside. And then having to convey to their patrons that, actually, we’re closing three hours early so everyone can get home while it’s still light outside.

But here at OKD, things are really heating up! We’ve got so many award nominations to share with you here (if you’ve been nominated, don’t worry, we’ll make it social media-official soon!), along with a really thoughtful feature by our own Megan Hannay about the characteristics of flash fiction that both make a good story and might get you an Okay Donkey acceptance.

If you’re reading this on the web and aren’t subscribed, we’d be thrilled if you did! Otherwise, we hope you have a wonderful month. We’ll see you in January with our OKD Editors AMA. 👀

We’re excited to share our Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction selections — be sure to give them a(nother) read!

by Megan Hannay, OKD Lead Fiction Reader

Sometimes, we find trends in the Okay Donkey slush pile. Like: one week every story will have a dramatic moment with a dog. Or a mermaid. Sometimes they’re stylistic, like a series of submissions in the second person. It’s fun to notice, but it doesn’t particularly matter. Each story has the opportunity to stand on its own, even if it shares a topic with the last piece we read.

But there are patterns that do cause us to pass on a story. One being: flash submissions that read more like an early chapter of a novel.

Novels and longer pieces have room to wander. But the best flash pieces and short stories are picky with their details. The world-building, backstory, or character development are precisely chosen, symbolic of much larger truths, and often do two jobs at once.

The recently published ”You be the Flotsam, I’ll be the Jetsam” by Melissa Rudick (October 2025) provides a good example of flash detail done well with the introduction — or lack thereof — of the narrator’s partner. We first meet Mary with the line “Mary picked me up…” We never learn if they’re married, if they have kids, how old the two characters are. We do learn that they’ve been together for fifteen years and that they live together. Those are the only details we need to understand the context of their relationship for the piece. They’re a couple that’s been together a while, and things have gotten a little rote. Many successful flash pieces do this: they allow the reader to walk into the room in the middle of the action and with just enough detail to establish the situation. Mary is part of this world; now let’s move on.

A favorite example of mine is “Love Me Like a Reptile” by Rachel Lastra (May 2025). This story is full of detail: Fred’s job and his wet cardboard personality. His “pink tongue glistening in his open mouth.” The narration is hyper-focused on the body. And there’s a reason for this, we learn: There's a physical intimacy that the narrator wants, and isn’t getting, from the relationship. It can be useful when writing a short piece to question moments of world building. Why is this detail important? Is it serving one job, or, like Lastra’s descriptions that also tell us so much about her narrator’s desires, is it doing two jobs at once? Flash that reads like part of a novel often include world building that ultimately doesn’t matter to the story on the page, leaving the story feeling incomplete.

“Door in the Woods” by Chris Scott (October 2025) is another great example. There is nothing in this story but a couple, a door, and an argument about what happened with the door. And the argument is on two levels: the typical couple’s argument where two people see things differently, and there’s an element of science fiction. What if they’re both right? The description, inner monologue, and dialogue work on both levels at once.

Another way flash submissions can feel like part of a larger piece is if they stop just when things get interesting. There’s nuance to this, because one could argue that “Door in the Woods” stops at an interesting juncture — the protagonist is determined to walk back through the door. But what I mean here is more a reveal. Some flash submissions end at a sudden twist or sharing of details that changes our understanding of the piece. Sometimes this lands well, but at other times these pieces read like the prologue to a novel. For short pieces that end with a reveal, I often wonder how the piece might open up if the writer put the reveal at the beginning and worked from there.

A quick glance through the OKD archives shows this pattern several times:

Of course, there’s the it-has-to-be-said caveat: as with any artistic advice or “rules,” there are always ways to break them and produce a piece that works well. These were a few of the trends I’ve seen, and I’d be curious to hear others’ thoughts on how flash pieces stand alone.

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