There’s a big fat whirlpool trying to suck me back into total retirement mode. It lures me closer with its siren song of book titles (novels and non-fiction releases) I want to read, hobbies I want to revisit, new skills I want to learn (like playing that stupid ukulele I bought). What is constantly being pushed to the bottom of my priority list? Writing, revising, editing, blogging, and everything related. In order to keep up with my critique group, I’ve switched to submitting hurried first drafts of short stories which I intend to submit to anthologies if I get around to revising and submitting before the deadlines. I did get two stories submitted to two different anthologies. One was accepted and will appear in Five Star ’s November 2019 release of The Spoilt Quilt and Other Frontier Stories: Pioneering Women of the West . I haven’t heard back about the submission to the Northern Colorado Writers 2019 Anthology called Rise (which has beautiful cover art ). Two other or...

In March 2013, I started a website with two authors, Jennifer Coissiere and Pachet Spates, titled SNAPS 1000 Words: Where Images and Words Converge . We (along with new snapper, author and PR guru Makasha Dorsey) provide weekly stories of 1000 to 1100 words that are inspired by pictures. It's something I've always done on my own as I love photography and writing, but I thought it would be cool to create a website where we could showcase some of our writing and where we could further develop our skills as writers. Writing short fiction, just as in writing poetry, requires wordsmiths to practice astute word economy, to pay even more attention to the point of attack for their story, and to figure out the heart of the matter quickly so that a full, engaging story can be told in a short space, among other important tasks. I asked my fellow snappers to provide some tips to writing short fiction (some might call it flash fiction or any number of other terms). I hope you find th...

When the call went out to writers in the Carolinas for short story submissions from the North Carolina Triad Chapter of Sisters in Crime, I thought, no, I write ninety-thousand-word novels, not short stories. The theme was lust, love, and longing, and naturally, there had to be a crime. Then I thought, oh, come on. Give it a try. The worst that could happen was my story wouldn’t be accepted. I had published three erotic romances along with my six mystery/suspense/thriller novels. I could write lust, and I sure could incorporate a crime. My first lesson, or teaching moment, was to read a bunch of short stories. Good ones from good writers. The commonality was each one had a twist ending. Undaunted, and with some idea of what I was doing, I devised my plot—a multi-award-winning director/writer/producer who discovers his beautiful, much younger Oscar-winning actress wife is having an affair with his son from his first marriage. He’d taken this young model with a little talent ...

Are you feeling a chill in the air lately? For the first time in a long time, I'm actually looking forward to snow. See, I've been looking at this festive cover for months, and it's finally time to share it with the world. Friends, I want to introduce you to the latest from Red Tash Books, Let It Snow! Season's Readings for a Super-Cool Yule . I'd love to tell you more about how this collection came about, too.   See, it's kind of Dani Greer's fault.   Over the summer I threw in a story with several of the BRP bloggers and a few other regulars of the BBT Cafe.   The result, The Corner Cafe , continues to garner great reviews and was a really fun experiment for me as a writer, as I decided to set my contribution in the world of my first novel, the best-selling dark fantasy, This Brilliant Darkness .   The Corner Cafe was the first of what would become seven anthologies I would contribute to in 2012.   I quickly realized the value of these ...

LAST SEGMENT OF OUR CONTINUING SERIES - 18 Stories! 15 Authors! Talk About A Project! The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories is riding high in sales, after a spectacular performance at its first freebie weekend on June 9 and June 10, 2012. The book is ready, but the work's not over. Dani Greer, owner of The Blood-Red Pencil, along with Morgan Mandel, Helen Ginger, Maryann Miller, Shonell Bacon, and Audrey Lintner, all contributors to the collection and members of The Blood-Red Pencil, are sharing our ongoing experiences with you about the project in this series. Perhaps, what we've discovered will aid you in your own endeavors.  Morgan Mandel  I hope you've enjoyed my ongoing series,which I am closing out today with my answers to the interview questions. It seems appropriate for me to be last, since one of my contributions to the collection,"The Closing of the Corner Cafe," appears last in the book. This story describes the rise and ...

CONTINUING SERIES - 18 Stories! 15 Authors! Talk About A Project! The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories is riding high in sales, after a spectacular performance at its first freebie weekend on June 9 and June 10, 2012. The book is ready, but the work's not over. Dani Greer, owner of The Blood-Red Pencil, along with Morgan Mandel, Helen Ginger, Maryann Miller, Shonell Bacon, and Audrey Lintner, all contributors to the collection and members of The Blood-Red Pencil, are sharing our ongoing experiences with you about the project in this series. Perhaps, what we've discovered will aid you in your own endeavors. Today, Audrey Lintner,our Style Maven, shares her views on the project. Her contribution is the short story, "The Consequences of Breaking and Entering," in which Goldilocks gets an update and her comeuppance. Connect with Audrey Lintner  Here on her Amazon Author page. 1) What surprised you about this endeavor? I think the thing that sur...

CONTINUING SERIES - 18 Stories! 15 Authors! Talk About A Project! The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories is riding high in sales, after a spectacular performance at its first freebie weekend on June 9 and June 10, 2012. The book is ready, but the work's not over. Dani Greer, owner of The Blood-Red Pencil, along with Morgan Mandel, Helen Ginger, Maryann Miller, Shonell Bacon, and Audrey Lintner, all contributors to the collection and members of The Blood-Red Pencil, are sharing our ongoing experiences with you about the project in this series. Perhaps, what we've discovered will aid you in your own endeavors. Riding along with us today is Maryann Miller, an author, editor, actor, director, who mixes a bit of Raymond Chandler noir with "The Twilight Zone," in her contribution of "Over the Threshold." Click Here to find Maryann Miller on Amazon. Here's What Maryann says of her experience with The Corner Cafe project: 1) What surp...

FIRST OF A CONTINUING SERIES - 18 Stories! 15 Authors! Talk About A Project! The Corner Cafe: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories is riding high in sales, after a spectacular performance at its first freebie weekend on June 9 and June 10, 2012. The book is ready, but the work's not over. Dani Greer, owner of The Blood-Red Pencil, along with Morgan Mandel, Helen Ginger, Maryann Miller, Shonell Bacon, and Audrey Lintner, all contributors to the collection and members of The Blood-Red Pencil, are sharing our ongoing experiences with you about the project in this series. Perhaps, what we've discovered will aid you in your own endeavors.  Dani Greer Dani Greer, owner of The Blood-Red Pencil blog, is the originator of the The Corner Cafe project. She's also provided the valuable services of editor, formatter, marketing leader, and contributor of three stories: "Home Away From Home" about a frequent visitor to a cafe who receives a surprise visit from the po...

I’d just finished writing the first draft of yet another novel that seemed to have wandered off in several directions when I made an important discovery. I was trying to work out (in retrospect) what my theme was, and so got out my old creative writing coursework books (this was pre-Google). As I checked through my manuscript for any inkling of the theme, I realised what I’d done: I tried to fit every single thing I wanted to say about everything (except for the stuff I’d written about in a previous novel) into this one book. And because I hadn’t planned on this particular book being very long or meaty, it really suffered from the lack of focus. I opened a sticky, peeling binder and found a yellowed sheet of paper with some old notes that jumped out at me: Determine your theme for your story – one theme per story [double underlined]. New theme, new story. (Complementary subthemes are okay.) Protagonist is “pro”-theme vs “anti” Antagonist. Every additional (unrelated) theme y...

Some people plan to write short stories. Some people also plan out their short stories, much like they plan out a novel, thinking about characters, plot, setting, etc, before they ever put pen to paper or finger to keyboard. I am not one of those people. With only a few exceptions, my short stories have been gifts from my muse that have come almost fully formed from word-one to The End. Some novelists are similarly gifted. Alas, I am not one of them. Novels take much more advance planning and thought. The first short story I had published in a major magazine was titled A String of Pearls , and my muse woke me up one night with the story. I stayed up for several hours writing it all in longhand - have I mentioned my writing career started when dinosaurs roamed the earth? This was also when a bunch of little kids roamed my house, so it was several days before I could get back to the story and see if what I wrote in the middle of the night made any sense. It did. So I typed it and sen...

I'm excited to be part of a fun enterprise, called The Corner Café: A Tasty Collection of Short Stories , edited by Dani Greer and Helen Ginger, with special assistance by Bob Sanchez, and cover design by Sherry Wachter. Featured are stories by the following authors: Marian Allen, Shonell Bacon, Karen Casey Fitzjerrell, W.S. Gager, Helen Ginger, Dani Greer, S..B. Lerner, Audrey Lintner, Morgan Mandel, Maryann Miller, Bodie Parkhurst, Bob Sanchez, Mary Montague Sikes, Red Tash, and Christine Verstraete.  Dani Greer Dani Greer, fearless leader of the BBTCafé e-group and The Blood-Red Pencil blog, is the instigator. She's the inventive one, who always comes up with great suggestions to expand our blogging and marketing horizons. This time she asked for volunteers from her BBTCafé e-group to compose short stories for a free collection to offer our readers. Not just any stories. Each must contain the words "Corner Café"...

Or Why I Stick to Writing Novels The title of this article, I realise, is provocative. It would seem to imply that I consider short stories to be inferior examples of the writer’s art: practice works produced by novices, or the second-rate oeuvres of mere dilettantes incapable of the sustained creative effort required to produce a full-length novel. In fact nothing could be further from the truth. Painful as it is for me to make this confession, the reason that I don’t (or very rarely) write short stories because (in general) I lack the intense, tightly-focused imagination needed to write a good one. The question now arises: what are the attributes of a good short story? Opinions here will differ, depending on who is addressing the question. A writer of Literary Fiction (who has read and admired the works of Raymond Carver) will contend that a good short story is one which evokes the cultural ambiance in which the writer is writing. By this standard of measurement, the ...

When I was a kid... oh, boy, here we go. But seriously, most of us remember reading stories in school by O. Henry , Guy de Maupassant , and Edgar Allan Poe .  The short story was part of my literary education from grade school through college. Later, I read short stories in magazines like the Ladies Home Journal , and regular contributor, Rosamunde Pilcher, is still one of my favorite authors. But as I grew older, novels became my entertainment of choice, and it wasn't until I got my Nook last year that I rediscovered the short story. E-books have changed reading habits for gazillions of people. Not only are we able to buy books in the blink of an eye, we can carry small libraries with us wherever we go. It's particularly convenient if one does a lot of research,and these gadgets are so smart, we can even make notes right in the books! But even better than that, we can sample lots of writing because many authors are using the short story format to introduce readers to their...