This week’s flash fiction prompt required me to come up with a title by randomly selecting a song from my music collection. I got “Thin Line,” by Jurassic 5 (featuring Nelly Furtado). While we weren’t required to use the song itself as an inspiration, I, uh, listened to Thin Line on repeat while I was writing. The result feels very different from most other pieces that I’ve written, and follows the song’s theme of questioning how romantic / erotic relationships can coexist with friendships. I was, quite honestly, surprised by the end. And that’s all I’ll say about that. Enjoy!
Category Archives: Stories
Flash Fiction: The First Is The Worst
This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig involved a 1000 word story that starts with a dead body. I ended up with this piece without even knowing where I was going, but perhaps you’ll like it. In case you’re wondering about the setting, I think it takes place in my Elven Progenitors story-world (though I still feel like it desperately needs a punchier name).
Enjoy!
Flash Fiction: Bloody Expanse
Not exactly how I imagine Hobb, but Isom Dart is close enough.
Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction prompt this week involved a randomly generated title and a 1500 word story, which led to what you can see above and below. I’m not sure exactly what caused that to make me think of what follows, but it felt about right. Ideas I passed over in favor of this one include: medical drama, massacre, way more murder… etc. I think I like this one better, as it’s an indirect sequel to my piece Trouble Close Behind from January 22nd. Enjoy. Continue reading
Flash Fiction: The Long Way Down
This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig involved perusing Flickr for interesting photos. I picked this one. I haven’t put it at the top of this post because the owner hasn’t given me the right to share it, but I strongly suggest that you go take a quick look. It’s pretty, for one thing, and it’s also the image that inspired this story.
Funny note; though the character was originally nameless, in one of my attempts at writing this I quickly discovered that I was writing Carmen Sandiego. The final result isn’t about Carmen Sandiego, but I kept the name because it’s the right image to have for her. With that in mind, read on! Continue reading
Awesome RPG Material Generators
The above image may not look like much, but it is actually amazing. It’s the product of a brilliant set of GMing tools, too good to pass up. This site (http://donjon.bin.sh/) offers you a random dungeon generator, with settings for party size, level, hall layout, shape, room size, and more. It gives you easily legible maps with mouseover text notes, and downloadable “secret-free” versions for your players. Other sections of the same site offer more random generators than I can shake a stick at, ranging from inns and magic shops to weather, treasure hoards, and encounters. It’s not perfect since it’s all pretty, uh, random, and you’ll want to edit features to fit your settings and stories… but it’s amazing when it comes to giving you rapid access to otherwise fiddly information for barely any effort. I do still want the ability to edit generated maps without having to convert them into some other system or format. But I’ve had so much fun playing around with this for the past few days, and it’s given me piles of ideas. Suddenly, almost all the prep work that I usually don’t like doing for D&D can be offloaded onto this, and that inspires me. If you run games and tell stories of any sort, check this out. It’s too cool to miss, even if you never end up using it yourself.
Flash Fiction: Making Bad Decisions Quickly
This week is car chase week on terribleminds. Now, I know that this car I have up here isn’t technically from Detroit, despite the words I use later on (I think it’s an Australian Ford model), but I couldn’t resist. It fit the car I was imagining too well for me to care. So, with that in mind, I hope you enjoy my story: Continue reading
Flash Fiction: Mustn’t Bother Mummy
I’m doing Chuck Wendig’s flash fiction challenge again this week, as I have since January, and I’ve had some trouble. This week’s prompt is a new version of the same subgenre blender that inspired me to write Dreams of Drowning. I got a very different combination this time (it’s a different random table, after all), and now I’m supposed to write a whodunit / comic fantasy. In 1500 words.
I’m about 3/4ths of the way to stumped.
I have written this with the whodunit firmly in mind. But trying to intentionally make comic fantasy? I’m really not sure what to do with myself. I’ve written pieces that I thought were comedic, or which people told me were funny, but that’s always been an incidental sort of thing; I guess the truth of it is that I don’t write those moments thinking “now it’s time to write some comedy.”
Anyway, I don’t know that I’d call this particularly comic, but I do hope you enjoy it. Continue reading
Flash Fiction: The Search History of a King
This week’s flash fiction challenge from Chuck Wendig is to tell a story in six to ten search terms. I suppose I’m cheating a bit, since I’m re-telling a story, but as soon as I had the idea it stuck. I couldn’t resist. Enjoy.
Search History:
- route from delphi to thebes
- sphinx riddle answer
- how to cure infertility
- define hubris
- define nemesis
- paternity testing
Flash Fiction: So many guns
Another week, another bit of flash fiction adventure. Chuck Wendig brought back the X meets Y challenge (last time I got Transformers meets Toy Story, which somehow led to a magical girl inspired western). This time I got True Detective meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I was stumped at first, but then I realized that GotG is actually just classic adventure fiction; I can easily replace space with water and spaceships with boats, and end up with a solid swashbuckling genre homage instead. As such, I wrote the piece in my Elven Progenitors setting. I think you’ll see the True Detective parallels without too much effort, if you have a decent memory for some of the episodes and character dynamics. This is, of course, it’s own thing. I also consider it more rough than usual, since I’m a bit rushed; I have to go get in line for the Avengers!
Anyway, I hope you like it.
Last Days of Loneliness: Crucial Exposition
I’ve solved some of my problems in Last Days of Loneliness, I think. If you read my earlier posts about how things were terrible and how I couldn’t figure out why Amanda knows to kill the eggs with fire, rest assured, I’ve stumbled across an excellent workaround.
I had very similar conversations with Ben and my brother Nate about how to solve my narrator’s knowledge problem, in which they basically said that I should make someone else in the town or cult tell her to use fire to kill the eggs. I, of course, resisted their advice at first. I’d had similar thoughts many times previously, and always dismissed them because I thought it made no sense for someone to break the cult’s taboos and try to warn Amanda. But after talking with both Nate and Ben, who both made it sound so plausible, and then reading some of George Buckenham’s rules for making games on Rock Paper Shotgun, I decided what the hell; I’d go ahead and do as Buckenham suggested. So I tried the stupid/simple solution. And I liked it.
Go figure.
What follows is the scene that I thought wouldn’t work, but did. It comes some time after a scene in which Amanda goes to the police station and overhears an interesting conversation, and long before her ultimate recognition of the information that she is given in this scene. Enjoy.






