This fortnight's challenge at flashfic_hub is one of my faaaavourites ever: Five Things. I freaking *love* writing "Five things that never happened to..." stories. Often they're the first thing I'll write in a fandom. They're like knitting swatches or doodling sketches, playing with ideas and playing with characters by chucking them into situations.

I think what I love most about the five things model is that it really makes the most of the good things about the short story model - each 'thing' is just a glimpse of a potential world, you're not required to show or develop a massive plot or anything. But there's skill to it, too - not just making sure that your five parts tie in together successfully, sit in the right order and have impact as a whole. But there's the risk of doing it badly - writing meta instead, or just notetaking, giving a blurb of your ideas instead of... well, each part presented in media res often makes the best five things, imho.

Anyway. I'm pondering what I'm going to write for this - am presently thinking about doing a "five ways the timeline occurred differently" - as in, in different order. e.g. the 456 turning up while Tosh and Owen are still around. But I might write more than one set, the possibilities are endlesss! And awesomefun, too. (Feel free to suggest themes for other sets I could write if you have ideas, btw.)

And that's the other good thing about five things, it really helps the writing process - there's not a lot of pressure to write something big, of course, but there's also that impetus when you've thought of what you'll do for one or two parts, and then are forced to come up with the others to make it a full five.

But enough rambling. MORE PEOPLE NEED TO WRITE FOR THIS CHALLENGE OK.