My spouse brought me a little cup of peanut M&Ms and black jelly beans, labelled with a post-it reading, “10 WORDS EACH,” because he knew I was struggling with getting started on my writing tonight.
As a writer, I know it’s tempting to read meaning into the length of time it takes a market to reject my story… and okay, sometimes there is. But as an editor, I know that the biggest factor is just which day I have free to work my way through a lot of stories and decisions.
Absolutely burst into laughter when a cover of “Crimson and Clover” started playing during a feast in the middle of a forest in the fantasy show Willow. (Yes, I’m several episodes behind.)
I’m so furious about my kids’ school policies about “attendance.”
Both of my kids are bright, have no trouble keeping up at school, and are doing distance learning. Yet, because we took them on a week-long trip where they didn’t log into their classes, the school’s in an uproar.
“Faye smiled tentatively, settling into this new reality they were creating together out of lies, a reality where what she’d seen — a true dragon’s face, staring into hers from only inches away, begging to be seen, understood, and maybe loved — was only an illusion.”
Bark broke from the trunk of the sharillow trees in large, curved chunks, littering the forest floor along with their fallen leaves. Storakka sifted through the pieces at the base of the biggest tree she could find, her talons running over the slightly curved sheaves of wood, rough on one side and smooth on the other. Finally she found an oval one she liked, about the same size as a human face. Continue reading “The Dragon’s Mask”
Originally published in Oxfurred Comma Flash Fiction Contest, July 2022
“Why did you leave me alive?” the queen bee buzzed at the honey look-alike, puddled under her tree. “Why didn’t you eat me too?”
Amber fluid dripped from the hive, but it wasn’t honey. It was thick and gooey and satiated. The amorphous being, gold and honey-like, had infiltrated the hive, feasted on the honey and then on the worker bees who’d made the honey; then the drones who the worker bees had waited on; and finally, on the delectable morsels of unfinished dough that were the eggs and pupae.
Thor: Love and Thunder seems pretty good. It’s hard to be totally sure since I watched it on an airplane after getting up at crazy-still-dark-AM-early o’clock and was too tired to be awake but too uncomfortable to be asleep. Continue reading “Flying to Hawaii”