In this article, we interview Steve Huff, WINNER of the July 2026 Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction with his story, SANDWORM.
Hi Steve, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your writing backstory?
I’ve loved words and stories for as long as I can remember. I was a bit of a precocious little shite charmer and learned to read quite early. Even before that I apparently used to toddle up to Dad with the giant Macquarie dictionary and ask him to just start reading random definitions, which I found immensely funny. For Year 1 show-and-tell I explained the plot of my picture book edition of The Odyssey. And yes, I was very popular in primary school.
I wrote my first story for a Year 4 assignment. All I remember is that I opened it with dialogue, and had my first experience of that fleeting moment of hatred one sometimes feels for one’s beta readers when Dad told me you shouldn’t open a story with dialogue. (If any of my beta readers are reading this—don’t worry, I always love your comments.)
After that, while I read an enormous amount, I really just wrote off and on, with stretches of many years in between. The self-critical impulse always tended to win out over the creative one, so I didn’t get far.
By the time I came across Furious Fiction in April 2024, I’d finished less than a handful of stories in total, with a few dozen more openings that had fizzled out because they were actually half-baked novel openings. I wrote a fantasy story for Furious Fiction that was more or less a rip-off of K.J. Parker’s voice, but in the space of a weekend I had a finished story for the first time in years.
I immediately googled flash fiction competitions and signed up for Not Quite Write, Twist, NYC Midnight and Writing Battle that month, and haven’t stopped.
You WON the July 2026 Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction. What did/will you spend your prize money on?
I’d like to say more books, but I’ve effectively been banned from buying any until I get through more of the ones spilling out from our shelves onto other available surfaces (although surely Kindle and Audible versions can’t hurt anyone who doesn’t know about them…)
I did just buy an impractical 30-year-old sports car from an auction in Japan to replace the very similar one I’ve driven for the last 18 years (creature of habit) so my prize winnings from the last couple of months are probably going towards that.
Your winning story featured the point of view of a frustrated penis. We hesitate to ask but… what inspired this story?
I’d say I thought long and hard about the prompts, but it was no great leap to go from “yang” to “wang”. Then a line popped into my head wherein a penis in the act of being revealed describes itself as bursting out like a sandworm. I was half-delirious from having just turned in the ridiculous NYCM Short Story final (1,250 words in 24 hours) that afternoon, so instead of self-censoring that idea I just started and went where the inexplicably-educated phallus took me. Knowing I needed to get to the grand reveal and the, uh, climax meant it would have to open with the frustrated build-up. The frustration suggested porn as an immediate target, but then the narrator’s snarky attitude started to spill over into the much-discussed “young male loneliness crisis”, the sad, sexually-confused grifters of the manosphere etc. I had a few potshots to take in that regard, but didn’t want the story’s attitude to Ben to be entirely without sympathy (I, too, was once a young man with an underdeveloped frontal lobe), and at the same time didn’t want to stray too far from the wang jokes.
You’ve been on a bit of a winning streak lately, can you tell us about that?
Yes, I’ve been fortunate enough this year to win the Twisted Tournament in March (after coming in second overall in the previous round), then in the space of about a month, the NYC Midnight 100 Word Challenge, the Not Quite Write Prize (yay!), and Writing Battle. I also came 9th overall in the NYCM Short Story contest around the same time which felt like an achievement because of the number of entrants and marathon nature of the 4 rounds.
It’s been a great feeling to achieve a win in each of the four competitions I started with, which at the time felt so far out of reach!
After witnessing several of our former winners go on winning streaks like yours, we at Not Quite Write have begun to form the view that some writers find themselves in a flow state where winning becomes easier, at least for a period of time. Would you credit your winning streak to the fickle fancy of a divine muse? The confidence boost that comes from winning once and knowing you can do it again? Or something else?
Good question – I wish I could pinpoint what I did differently and keep doing it!
I think often my stumbling block in flash and micro fiction has been a desire to shove in elements and concepts and then jump up and down on the story to make it fit, rather than picking an appropriately-sized idea to begin with. I love writing fantasy and SF, but when I do, I can’t resist the allure of worldbuilding (what M. John Harrison, one of my favourite writers, memorably called “the great clomping foot of nerdism”) and that is mostly not well suited to flash. I feel like I have done a better job in recent months of keeping my ideas manageable and not going further afield speculatively than the kind of dystopia that doesn’t take much explaining.
A less obvious factor is probably what I was reading during that period. I went through a few hefty novels by William T. Vollmann in a row, which is something like the experience of listening to a genius and being ranted at by a madman at the same time, and you can’t quite tell which is which. They just felt like he wrote exactly what he wanted to write, including not being afraid to get a bit (or very) purple, pause to address the reader directly etc. I think those as well as Updike’s Rabbit books which I read next freed me up a bit to not keep such a tight rein on my prose (which was definitely the case for Sandworm!) The device of the omniscient narrator directly addressing the reader cropped up in both my NYCM and WB winning stories, even though they had nothing else in common with Vollmann, as well as some verging-on-purple lines that felt right but I might have previously cut.
You have shortlisted before in the Not Quite Write Prize (The Way Out, October 2025). You’ve also longlisted many times. In your experience, what qualities do you think elevate a longlisted story to a shortlisted one?
In the case of my stories at least, I can say they were the ones that felt the most like “me” (The Way Out is still one of my favourites). Sometimes I do tend to write with the competition or the judges in mind, or find myself trying hard to write something that feels like a “competition story”, but with both of my shortlisted ones I can say I really just wrote what felt right for the voice. The longlisted ones maybe felt like I had tried harder to land a particular emotional effect or catch attention with the weird elements.
Having a number of friends who have shortlisted or won the Not Quite Write Prize, I think similarly their shortlisted stories really just sound like them, like the kind of stories no one else could have written. I think that quality comes through and elevates a story that might otherwise have solid mechanics, some good gags, or a visceral gross-out factor that might land a longlist place. One of the great things about the Not Quite Write Prize is the range of stories that shortlist (from heartfelt poems to rom coms to dark & disturbing to ghost stories to fart and zombie jokes), but I’d say something they almost all have in common is a strong voice that catches you and doesn’t let you go until it’s done.
Can you share any words of wisdom with our Not Quite Write Prize hopefuls?
Read some previous shortlists to get a feel for the possibilities (but don’t be constrained by them), listen to what Amanda and Ed say on the podcast about what they like (but take it with a grain of salt since you might just deliver the story they didn’t know they needed), pick an idea you think you could tell in 250 words, and get cracking.
About Steve
Steve lives in Perth, where he buys books at a faster rate than he reads them, provides domestic services to two cats, and writes when given a deadline.
He has had winning stories in the NYC Midnight 100 Word Challenge, Writing Battle, the Not Quite Write Prize for Flash Fiction, and Twisted Tournament. His short fiction has appeared in Crepuscular, Saros Speculative Fiction, Elegant Literature and others.
Published stories can be found on Steve’s author page:
https://twistedtournament.com/author/stevenhuff
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