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Tag: short stories

Six Sentence Sunday 3-25-2012

It’s another Six Sentence Sunday! Today I’m sharing a snippet from one of my short stories from new collection about women and their tattoos – Portrait of Woman in Ink: A Tattoo Storybook. In this story, Hallie is on the verge of starting a new life with her son, and working her way toward the tattoo from her old life removed.

She inched the SUV up to a stop light, a bright green corvette idling in the next lane over.  She suppressed the urge to examine the door panel to determine the easiest point of entry to unlock the car, steal it, and drive into oblivion.  The check engine light in her SUV’s instrument panel flicked on, as it typically did when the engine idled for longer than it liked.  You couldn’t think about those kinds of things when you were a mom.

Ever since Lucas had gotten too heavy to carry into their small, rent-controlled, two-bedroom apartment, Hallie began letting him take her keys and run to the front door of their building.  She didn’t know how he knew at three years old that keys were a symbol of responsibility, but today – like every day – he took the keys she held out for him with an air of deference, like she’d just handed him the cure for cancer.

Don’t forget to check out all the other talented peeps on Six Sentence Sunday!

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New short story up: Date Zero

I’ve had this story written for awhile, but life has been really busy, between my real job and my freelance job, by which this story was inspired. Back in January, I took a job as a virtual dating assistant on a freelance basis. I write people’s online dating profiles and create messages to potential matches on their behalf. It’s a lot more work than I thought it would be originally, but it’s also teaching me a lot about a world I never knew and giving me insight into the lives of some of the clients and their matches. Honestly, anyone’s Match.com profile would be an amazing place to go for inspiration as a writer.

So my newest short story, Date Zero, is very loosely based on a client I wrote for a lot. I sometimes wonder, if our clients get really far with someone, at what point to they tell them that they hired a service to do their work for them? Anyway, there’s a lot of that in this story. Hope you enjoy it.

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New Short Story: The Camera

Last week I was struggling with whether to finish either of the 2 short stories I’ve been working on for what seems like ages and whose writer’s block has given me fits of semi-insanity, or tabula-rasa it and start over, when a friend told me a crazy story.

It was all about how he found this camera while we were in Lawrence, which I remember, and how he found the person it belonged to, just by the pictures that were on it and his powers of deductive reasoning. Well, the truth might be stranger than fiction, but I’ll let you be the judge of just how implausible this really sounds. Check out The Camera and let me know what you think.

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My first short story publication!

Happy Columbus Day, everyone! I got an email late last night that Line Zero, a new quarterly arts journal, is going to pick up Two Steps Forward! I almost didn’t believe it, but I took a look at the site this morning and on the post with the finalist announcements was my name.

http://linezero.org/literary-finalists/

The issue comes out in November and I can’t wait to see it. This is a brand new journal, just opened for submissions at the beginning of September. I heard about them on Twitter, I think. It just goes to show that it pays off to keep track of emerging players in the market and get in on the ground floor!

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