My Agent Told Me To Make A Blog

Touring the grounds and palace of Versailles sparked all sorts of ideas for stories and settings. My husband and I visited Paris early on in our relationship (during the trip, he went from boyfriend to fiancee :D). Let me tell you something--I really underestimated how cold France is during March. Our visit to Versailles was quite the adventure. For starters, we had to take the metro farther outside the city than we'd ever been, which involved upgrading our train passes (a confusing and expensive ordeal). The ride itself was long and allowed a view of Paris rolling past us. Heart of the city and out through the suburbs. And a bunch of French highschoolers getting on and off from our cabin. Versailles itself is divided into two parts--the mansion, and the grounds. Getting the tickets for each was another confusing and expensive ordeal, with the longest queue you've ever seen. It turns out we really shouldn't have gone in March. Half the place was closed off, the res...

This was written for an informal contest with the following prompt: "BURN AFTER READING" was all the book said. The spine was a match striker, the outside contained a single match. I decided to try for a Lovecraftian style, heavily influenced by The Nameless City . --- Sand shifted in currents through the ruined city. Even with my scarf and gloves, grit found its way into my mouth and the folds of my skin as I lumbered over uneven hills. Some dunes piled into high banks against the crumbling buildings, almost swallowing them, while others spread so thin I could see the cobbled road beneath them. And always, even under the intense midday sun, I stopped at every flash of shadow and held my breath. It had been well over a decade since the Horrors ravaged this city and moved on, but I couldn’t help imagining their long, spindly arms reaching around this corner, or their yawning mouths and pit-like eyes peering from beneath that outcrop. It had been drilled into me: cities...

I swear I didn't forget to blog, I just had the death plague for a while. And then had an inpatient that needed overnight monitoring, and the whole not-getting-any-sleep thing had a butterfly effect on the rest of the week. I'm bad at blogging, particularly the "thinking of things to blog about" part. In order to keep things fresh, I'm going to add in some new subjects. I might start doing some "critique" posts, since that's something I both love and spend a lot of time doing (which may or may not require sacrificial lambs to give me work to chew). More certainly, however, I'll start posting flash fiction regularly. I'm accumulating a lot of entries from informal and formal contests alike, often with bizarre prompts, so that should be fun. You can expect the first flash story next week!