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Entries Tagged as 'Short Fiction'

“A Guy I Know Once Told Me…”

November 12th, 2008 · 2 Comments

The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · Looking Backward · Short Fiction · The Internet · The Online World

The Open-Heart-Surgery Theory of Writing

November 6th, 2008 · 6 Comments

For Halloween last week, in their contribution to the weekly around-the-Web Poetry Friday, the folks at the Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast blog offered up Poe’s weird — and kind of forced — “Ulalume” (full title “To — – –. Ulalume: A Ballad”).
The ensuing discussion got me thinking once more about Poe — “once more” [...]

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Tags: Language · Poetry · Reading · Ruminations · Short Fiction · Style and Craft · Writing

Happy Birthday, Lester Dent

October 12th, 2008 · 4 Comments

Today marks the 104th anniversary of the birth of Lester Dent, a/k/a Kenneth Robeson.
Not exactly a household name these days, eh? But in his time, which occupied a substantial chunk of the first half of the last century (he died young, in 1959), Dent was one of the most prolific and most successful writers on [...]

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Tags: Books as Books · Language · Reading · Ruminations · Short Fiction · Writing

Short Fiction: The Iron

October 6th, 2008 · 4 Comments

Somewhere in her book of advice for writers, Starting from Scratch, Rita Mae Brown says something about writing a story from the point of view of a character other than the author’s own sex. I don’t remember the exact words, don’t have my copy with me, and can’t find the quote online. But she says [...]

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Tags: Short Fiction · Style and Craft · Writing

Art, Meet Life. Life, This Is Art.

September 22nd, 2008 · 2 Comments

You may remember my 10(ish)-year-old story “The Bug,” which I posted here a few weeks ago. In it, the protagonist — home at work with a fever, some kind of bug anyhow — stumbles upon a very strange cable-TV channel. Its name is The Dead Channel; all its programming has to do, somehow, with death. [...]

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Tags: Science & Medicine · Short Fiction

Upsetting the Apple Cart

September 15th, 2008 · 12 Comments

I’m going to go out on a limb here and…
…no, I’m not going to write a post about posts which begin with long-dead metaphors, posts whose authors should really know better. Though I, or somebody, probably should.
What I am going to say is possibly heretical and, well, possibly something I should keep my mouth shut [...]

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Tags: Reading · Short Fiction · Style and Craft · The Business · The Online World · Writing

Short Fiction: Modem Operandi

September 13th, 2008 · 4 Comments

One thing The Missus has always said about my writing: if it amuses no one else, it amuses me. Personally, I think she exaggerates. It doesn’t all “amuse” me. [wounded sniff] But one story, well, I really enjoyed writing it. And it still makes me grin to re-read.
Like many stories I wrote in the ’90s, [...]

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Tags: Short Fiction · The Online World · Writing

The Touraine Passenger

September 6th, 2008 · 4 Comments

Writing exercise, short version: Write a story (or poem or essay or what-have-you) (blog entries don’t count, ahem) whose title is “The Touraine Passenger.” The “the” is optional, but the other two words must be used in that order in the title; one or both may, at the author’s discretion, be italicized.
(If you’ve no other [...]

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Tags: Language · Running After My Hat · Short Fiction · Style and Craft · The Internet · The Online World · Writing

Short Fiction: “The Cabin”

September 1st, 2008 · 2 Comments

A few weeks ago, trying to kick-start my creative engine, I set myself a goal. The idea was to write a short story, by September 1, whose first and last sentences were “found,” that is, already written by someone else. For extra credit (don’t you love the way people play these games with themselves?), I [...]

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Tags: Running After My Hat · Short Fiction · Style and Craft · Writing

Creating in the Margins

August 27th, 2008 · 2 Comments

After yesterday’s post about and the tendency of things to break down along edges, I was reminded this morning about the other side of the matter: the tendency of interesting and indeed surprising things, good things, to happen between two adjacent experiences.
A few weeks ago, I set myself a general writing objective (to write a [...]

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Tags: Everyday Life · Ruminations · Short Fiction · Writing