Fiction For Now
Sometimes #VSS365 flash fiction prompts are perfect opportunities to share glimpses of my longer works. October's collection, with its macabre Halloween theme, proved ideally suited to the visceral elements of my cyberpunk novel Binary Chop. Every installment this month is an excerpt from the book, modified for length where necessary. Prompts are in bold, and... Continue Reading →
When did Halloween become such a big deal? As a kid, trick-or-treating with my sister, I don’t recall much neighborhood decor besides the jack-o-lanterns grinning on the porch or some fake spiderwebs strung across the hedges. Now Halloween seems more popular than Christmas. Specters dangle from the trees on my block; front yards become graveyards;... Continue Reading →
October is my favorite month for many reasons, including the Major League Baseball post-season. The crisp air amplifies the crack of wood on leather, and my strident voice when I scream at the television: "Come on, ya chumps! You got a runner in scoring position, just put the ball in play and..." I paused in... Continue Reading →
"...The story of an astronaut as she struggles to adjust to life on Earth!" the radio ad promised. My car's dashboard briefly transformed into the glowing cockpit of a space shuttle. Space, psychology, and a female protagonist? That sounded like a movie I'd see (or a book I'd write). But when I looked up which... Continue Reading →
Since I tend to fall off the daily flash fiction wagon after the first week of each new month, I set myself punitive parameters for August: every prompt missed would have to be used in the next piece I wrote. Some days I accumulated as many as four mandatory words. This challenge, unexpectedly, resulted in... Continue Reading →
Confession: I usually avoid Twitter during PitMad. The quarterly Twitter "Pitch Party" invites writers to post 280-character manuscript pitches, which agents and editors can request with a 'like'. Twitter's eager writing community, amped up on fantasies of scoring a book deal, turn my feed into an endless scroll of self-promotion and supportive retweets. I'm not... Continue Reading →
