Tuesday, November 3, 2009
Inspiration
He believed his best attempts at fiction were usually based on his own life experiences. Turning real life into fiction seemed to work much better than all of his pitiful attempts to write in his favorite reading genres of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. But now he was faced with the awesome...
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Friday, October 16, 2009
...a little like deja vu.
He sometimes wondered if Dad had felt terribly neglected and alone in his last few years. It was a thought that rarely occurred when Dad had been just an hour's drive away, a mere two hours round trip. Close enough that he could have easily popped over every other weekend, certainly at least once a...
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Thursday, August 6, 2009
Both sides of the coin, now
She done him wrong, and then she left him rather than the other way around. But that was only one side of the coin. On the other side he had to admit he probably deserved it. He had settled into a pattern where almost all of his energy was devoted to trying to keep them afloat. There had been little...
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Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Simple pleasures
He missed the soothing rhythm of falling rain on a metal roof. It had been one of the few pleasures of the ramshackle old trailer he had lived in for so many years. “Mobile homes” they called them now, though they had evolved into structures so large and heavy that “mobile” was an obvious misnomer....
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Tuesday, June 30, 2009
"The older I get..."
He looked at the full caption on the old T-shirt hanging in the closet. “The older I get, the better I was” it said Not strictly true, he thought. I've never been one prone to exaggerate my accomplishments. But I sure don't like looking at that stranger in the mirror. He walked back to the bathroom...
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Saturday, June 27, 2009
The good old days
"Good game, Billy," the proud grandfather said. "You looked just like your Dad running the bases. That was your first base hit, wasn't it?" "Yeah, Poppa," the excited youngster replied, "and I scored a run that helped us win the game!" "That you did," the old man said. "You know, it was a little...
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Wednesday, June 17, 2009
"It was a dark and stormy night..."
I looked at the famous first line with more than a little amusement. In reality it was a gray, rainy day. But that was not the point. Getting started on the story without being trite or overly sensational was the point. A bland or hokey first line would probably stop any potential reader right there...
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Monday, March 30, 2009
A day of frustration, joy, horror and sadness
It sounds like the beginning of an interesting short story, perhaps even a novel, in which the conflicting elements of living in today’s world are represented by the events of a single day in one person’s life. It is the gamut of emotions I went through yesterday. My joy was twofold: Michigan State,...
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Sunday, February 1, 2009
What if?
What if Momma had not let me go to live with Grandma and Grandpa? Or better yet, what if she had stood by Dad while he fought tuberculosis and I had been the oldest of a large brood of city kids? What if Grandpa had not retained a little wanderlust and uprooted us every few months to couple of...
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Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Heaven is…
a warm place. Not hot. That, I think, would be the other place. Although I guess hell is, by definition, the place you would least like to be, under the circumstances you would most like to avoid. I don’t relish the thought of never ending and oppressive heat. But I hate being cold. Cold hands and...
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Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Choices
“You don’t need me to remind you that times are tough, Son. And you certainly don’t need me to tell you what to do. I think you’ve already figured that out on your own. You’re looking for a new job, aren’t you.” “Yeah, Dad. I’ve been looking since early summer when they cut our hours back. But there...
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Thursday, January 1, 2009
Seek and you shall find.
There are a few short stories out there that, on first reading, made me wish I was capable of writing something capable of delivering a similar impact to all the readers I hoped to have some day. A couple of them, Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” and Shirley Jackson’s “The...
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Saturday, November 22, 2008
The synthesis of fact with fiction
It’s a never ending challenge for those who wish to write entertaining fiction. Whenever I set myself to the task of fiction it often seems that I’m spending a great deal of time consciously downplaying elements of fact upon which I draw. This factual material usually pops up as research conducted...
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Saturday, November 15, 2008
Conspiracy Theory
For nearly a week his antique computer has frozen every time he got to the point of actually trying to post something on Blogit. He knew it was not really an insiduous conspiracy to keep him from being heard. He wasn’t not wacko enough to think he have anything important enough or significant enough...
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Sunday, November 2, 2008
Who is that tap, tap, tapping at my door?
The faint knocking sound roused me from my drowsy stupor. I checked my watch. A little after 9:15, and it’s still dark outside. So, it’s still the night of the thirty-first and not too late for someone to be knocking at the door. There! A faint tapping sound again. Or was it gusts of wind blowing...
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Thursday, October 2, 2008
Juggling Act
Jesse never had been any good at juggling. As a small boy Jesse was fascinated by the antics of old Mose, a master of the soft-shoe, drinking prodigious quantities of moonshine, and juggling three apples at once. Old Mose could drink half a gallon of shine and still do his little dance and juggle...
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Wednesday, September 3, 2008
"You are not a failure,"
The words caught my attention as much because of the source as because of their meaning. The source was one of those strange birds who wants to test his wings and fly, but can't because he cannot make himself release the death grip he has on Momma's apron strings. Yet somehow he was perceptive...
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Sunday, August 31, 2008
Not a flash in the pan…flash fiction
Flash fiction is one of the many contemporary terms for what we used to call short short stories. I was going to present a list of many of the new names for this venerable old form, but got sidetracked by a combination of computer problems, personal problems, and family problems. The computer...
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Thursday, July 24, 2008
Pffah!
Poetry, poetry, and more poetry kept popping up in the Top 100 of his writing group. It was almost to the point of becoming a poetry web site -- and he avoided those like the plague. He found most of what passed for poetry to be too depressing to tolerate, or so sickly sweet that it turned his...
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Monday, July 7, 2008
Fiction is easy to write.
Good fiction, on the other hand, has to be one of the most difficult tasks a human being can attempt. There are exceptions, of course, but mighty damned few who can whip out decent fiction as if there was nothing to it. For the rest of us it is a grueling, painstaking task to produce a readable work...
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