Archive for the ‘All’ Category
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I hereby dub it the Easter Earthquake
I’m pleased with myself at my commitment to the story-a-day. This morning, Amanda and I slept in until about 9:30, which is atypical for us–we’re usually up by 6:30 or 7 am to run. Shortly thereafter, Jeremy and Nicole arrived at our place for a modest Easter Brunch. They brought makings for mimosas, and we prepared a fine breakfast of French toast, quiche and fruit salad. And when I say “we prepared”, I mean Amanda did everything. I was upstairs, hammering out today’s story. Brunch came and went. It was delightful. Then, just as I was settling in to continue ...
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Between a 10 mile run and an Easter barbeque…
We woke up super early today to run 10 miles along the Mission Trails park and I was on a deadline because we’re going to an Easter egg-hunt/barbeque at Jeremy and Nicole’s. Somehow, deadlines always help. They’re the heat and pressure to my lump of coal. With deadlines, diamonds can happen. Without them, you’ll usually just end up with a mess of dusty black stuff on your hands. Well, you get the idea… Third Installment
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Second installment
Today’s writing went a little long. This story is roughly 2,500 words, which is well above my usual goal of 1,000 words a day. To be perfectly honest, the idea for this story was one that I’ve been kicking around. So it’s likely that the length of it is due to the fact that I had a certain narrative arc in mind. Originally, I meant for this to be a children’s story. For some reason, though, every time I sit down to write something for kids, it always comes out way more gritty and often violent than I’d set out ...
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April Challenge
Spring is in the air, and after more than 2 years of working on said novel and writing only a handful of short stories in that time, I’ve been itching lately for a new project. Or at least a reason to move on to something else. So now I’m issuing a kick-in-the-pants challenge to myself: to write a story a day for the entire month of April. This is perhaps the worst month I could have chosen for such an endeavor, I’ve got a bachelor party to attend, a half marathon, the 3 day Coachella music festival in the desert, ...
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A Falling Whale
I’ve noticed a strange reoccurring motif in my writing: animals. For some reason, exotic animals always seem to slip into my stories. I don’t know why. Not that this story focuses around animals or anything, actually, there are no real animals in it, per se. Just in the title. What we have here is another story I’ve recently dusted off. I wrote it a few years back and never really thought about it until recently. Very quickly, a weird story. The protagonist’s name in this story is Katharine Black. As I was writing this (well after I’d chosen her name) ...
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The Dead Pet Shop
Here’s a story I recently finished. I read part of it at our MFA program’s 20th anniversary bash at the San Diego Museum of Art. Never read in an art hall before. Very echoey. Anyhow, I hope to send this to a couple of contests in the near future. Comments are welcome. Enjoy! Dead Pet Shop
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What I’ve been up to
I can’t say I’ve been idle lately. I’ve been working feverishly on my novel, which I’ve considered posting here but haven’t had the guts to do. It’s nowhere near polished. But I’ve been up to other things as well, I just finished editing the first annual MFA Anthology of Creative Writing for the program at SDSU. The compilation is an effort of the Writers Collective, (a student organization of which I’m the head cheese). Here’s a link to the finished product, which is available at lulu.com… http://www.lulu.com/content/2388038 It’s my first effort as an editor, and I’m rather proud of how ...
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Another not fiction post
It’s been quite a busy semester for me, one fraught with peril, suspense, danger, and the occasional compulsory laundry duty. The bulk of my sweat and tears have been going into starting up an organization on campus called The Writers Collective at SDSU, (check out our wiki website). But somehow I managed to recently get a story into an online magazine (forthcoming) called Theives Jargon (click here) , the story should appear around the end of March or mid April. It seems like many things are going my way, but are getting harder at the same time, so maybe that’s a ...
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Virgil was still the frog boy…
This story isn’t exactly a story, it’s an exercise that I completed for a class this semester. The stipulation of the exercise was this: somewhere in the story, you have to say “Virgil was still the frog boy.” We got together during finals week and everyone read their story. Some were about kissing frogs, one incorporated the frog suit from Super Mario Brothers 3, which I thought was rather clever. Anyway, here was my addition to the pot: Because common arithmetic failed to explain the situation, Dr. Sound developed an entirely new set of mathematics. The problem was this: in ...
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The Cake Man
(This is a revamped version of the story by the same name that I posted a few months ago. Feel free to leave comments and feedback.) I pull the wrinkled paper from my back pocket and unfold it. Alvis writes like a chicken. Two weeks ago, when I received the letter, I had to decode each word. Now, I re-read it for the hundredth time and hope that somewhere in it I’ll find a clue, something telling. He wrote, How’s the acting business? Don’t give up on finding work. Dry today, maybe, but when it rains it pours. Alvis ...
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Big Bang Daisy
There is a region on the Atlantic coast of France where salt water daily sweeps in and back out again with the tidal pull. A small castle sits atop the hazy hill in the distance. There are two or three other hills on the horizon, but they are occupied by nothing more than grass and sheep. Everything in between these hills is sand. If the tide is low we may continue on the secret path of solid earth, which is invisible among the wasteland of quicksand that waits still and silent like a spider’s web. ...
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