Short Stories – Skeletons in the Closet
Sunday, I presented a new story at The Encyclopedia Show in Minneapolis. The theme of the show as Pirates.
Since I’ve been writing short fiction, my typical focus for these shows is to put together a short story. Initially, I’d been thinking about a time travel story involving Blackbeard. But then I decided I’d write about something I knew a little better.
I also drew a tiny bit from a story some friends told me about this attraction. I’m afraid there are no Jungle Book skippers in this one. Literally five people will get that reference so I left it out.
For those who read my stories, thanks! I’m going to try to work back up to once per week (from once per month)!
Short Story – Hot Tea
It has been a while since my last short story. Fortunately, I signed up to do a storytelling show about dragons and I was compelled to write something new!
This entire story grew out of being amused by the idea of a dragon sipping tea. I don’t know why that image really stuck with me but it resulted in what I wrote here.
I also made the decision to avoid giving the dragon a gender. It is not the same as creating a truly gender neutral character – something I hope I can do in a future story – but I didn’t feel the gender of the dragon was relevant.
As always, I hope you take a moment to read, comment, share and enjoy!
Short Story – Mars Exploded on a Thursday
I banged this one out pretty quickly this afternoon. I’ve not posted a new short story in a few weeks and I decided I just needed to write and post something without worrying so much about how the final story turned out. I’m happy with the result, though.
The idea for this story began with the first sentence, “Mars exploded on a Thursday.” I like that opening. It provides a what the fuck kind of beginning. From there, the story gets pretty strange.
So for the few people who have been reading my stories, I’m sorry for the delay. I’ve had trouble getting off the horror theme I was working on in September and October. Thanks for bearing with me!
As always, feel free to share, comment, read, or ignore!
Short Story – The Bear
Sorry I missed last week. Fringe festival messes with my writing schedule. I’ve been toying with horror and revenge lately. There is some triggery stuff in this week’s story that involves incest and suggested rape. So be warned about that.
I keep toying with this idea as a play. Not sure if I could turn it into a 45-50 minute show as it is right now but the pieces are there for it to expand to something more than what I’ve written here.
The story itself is self contained. But I can feel there is more that could be explored with this character.
I was in Utah earlier this year so I chose the area that is now Arches National Park as the setting. I don’t typically worry about such things but I wanted to give a little bit of a sense of place.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy reading it!
Short Story – Winter
I’ve missed a couple of weeks so if you are one of the people who actually looks for a story every Wednesday (I know there are a few of you), I’m sorry about that!
This week, I really just started with the idea of a snowstorm on an alien planet. I’m also doing a live reading of a story next week so I needed something that ran about 3-5 minutes, so the story needed to be shorter than usual.
I hope you read and enjoy. As always, comments, thoughts, criticisms, and shares are welcome!
Short Story – The Race
This week, I started with the idea of writing about a race. I didn’t know what kind of race it was. I just used the concept of racing as the seed.
I’ve been doing some public readings as a part of the Not So Silent Planet series in the Twin Cities and because that is a speculative fiction series, my thoughts have gravitated towards that genre. So the race became one taking place in space.
Several of my recent stories have trended pretty dark. This one actually bucks that trend.
As always, read, comment, share. These stories may be at mostly an exercise for me but it’s still nice to hear what people think – good or bad.
Grail Diary 