#nffd

Essay by Zach Roddis

    The best we can think of are Radstewart, Joanna Gruesome, Elvis Depressedly, and Guantanamo Baywatch. I'm sipping coffee in a not-for-profit arts cafe in central Manchester with some of my best friends. We discuss pun-based band names, books and songs. 

It is the twenty-first of June 2014, and I’ve just finished performing at my book launch; I self-published a book of tweets and held the launch in a zine library housed in said cafe. It is National Flash Fiction Day or NFFD if you wanna be concise. NFFD is timely as my good friend and fellow writer, Fat Roland, has two great short fiction books and is supporting me at the book launch. We discuss the immediacy of pop music and the fandom surrounding Justin Bieber and One Direction (among other topics). 

The coffee leaves froth behind on the sides of the mug. Having just been involved in the literature event we will eventually go our separate ways. One of us will go and see an interactive play at an abandoned building. One of us will go and see a band called Glass Animals at a reasonably well-known venue (a band that I've already seen – a long time ago when they supported Telepathe in a smaller venue). One of us will go to an all-dayer and watch Hot Shorts, the musical project of writer Chris Killen. I end up going to a DIY show at a comic store. 

All of this is relevant because it is the culture that is in the air, rather than it being attributed to any single journey that day. The comic store will host three bands including We Came Out Like Tigers. It's on the same street as the arts cafe I am currently paused in. All of these journeys take place in the square mile that surrounds. Out of everything, it's the feeling that live music can exist anywhere that resonates the most. The Do-It-Yourself nature of any one day, any series of events in the same place, is of priority at a time when the punk scene comes under criticism from some individuals and on some blogs. 

The first major step I took in my career as a writer (other than choosing Creative Writing as a degree) was starting up a flash fiction blog with some of my fellow writers at university. We became ...