I write for fun outside of the lugubrious essays you might find here. One of my favorite places that incites me to write is New York Midnight, which runs contests five times a year for flash fiction, short stories, short screenplays, and now microfiction. Contests typically have 3 or 4 rounds, where by the process of elimination only the top scorers in each round advance to the next round. For the latest contest, Flash Fiction, I had to write a 1000-word story in 48 hours. And not just some random story. I’m assigned a genre, a location, and a prop, which I don’t find out until the moment the contest…