Day One “We’re putting together an anthology,” they say. They have an email to prove it. Very few combinations of five words so excite The Short Story Guy. Maybe “short stories turn me on,” or “sure, we’re a paying market.” It is not a literary style I’ve written in. Despite that, perhaps because of it, I am intrigued.…… Continue reading The Fall and Rise of Draft One
Category: This Whole Writing Thing
Behind: “The Carcassonne Dream”
It is winter. Christmas Eve 2011, and Writer Guy rides the train to Arles. Second class. The South of France trundles by outside, salt flats and olive trees, the mountainside and harbor towns of the Mediterranean coast. I sip my Coca-Cola Lite and return to my laptop. For in France the writing flows, as fast as the sweeping…… Continue reading Behind: “The Carcassonne Dream”
Behind: “La Upsell”
Here, in honor of its recent republication, is a “Behind The Short Story” I wrote for “La Upsell.” The short story is its own literary animal, a wholeness experienced in few words and on small bones. Some writers get a sunbeam and angel choir moment of inspiration. Others grit it out, go find the story. I’m…… Continue reading Behind: “La Upsell”
Satire: “He Writes in the Present Tense”
Bob’s note: The old woman here is, in my head anyway, a prototype for the old man in “The Carcassonne Dream.” Oh, and the tortured subject-verb relationships…well, that kind of the point. Today fiction chooses him. Among the crowd circling the bookstore café, he is fastest to claim the open table. He powers up his laptop and…… Continue reading Satire: “He Writes in the Present Tense”