In my last post to this blog, I had the pleasure of announcing the two winners of the LongShortStories Short Story Contest.

Our SECOND-prize winning short story is a power-packed 150-word Flash Fiction piece, a piece true to our credo that “less is more” when it comes to the magnificient short story form.

But before I introduce this amazing piece, I want to again encourage all readers and writers to submit your best UNPUBLISHED, ORIGINAL short story entries to us as soon as possible. Our Contest rules can be found on our Web site’s Home Page at www.LongShortStories.com . Click on the Contests navigational button.

It is now my distinct pleasure to introduce you to Kendra Lisum of Missoula, Montana. She was recently awarded our Second Prize of $150 cash and a one-year subscription to the first 30 stories in the LongShortStories collection.

Kendra was born and raised in northeast Ohio. She attended the University of Nevada, Reno, and graduated with a degree in Creative Writing in 2006. In pursuit of her writing goals, she moved to Missoula, Montana, where the community and the beauty have influenced her writing in many ways. She loves the challenge of short stories, and has recently finished writing her first book.

Neckties and Lilacs
Kendra Lisum

It wasn’t that I wanted to do it. Not really. I saw you together and it all fell apart. The plan. The story. The ending.
The room smelled of lilacs–stale, faintly sweet. Like bodies after release. I imagine, even now, that I can smell them on the edges of a breeze. But there is no breeze.
If there is a god, I’ll ask him–her, I think it’s a her– I’ll ask her why lilacs smell of fornication and death. The intoxicating, over-before-it-begins smell of life.
The tie is soft but strong. A birthday gift from a nephew I never met. Arrived in the post one day signed “Love, Maria and Thom.” I don’t have a sister named Maria or a nephew named Thom, pronounced “Tom” but with an H. And it wasn’t my birthday.
The definition of irony: I’d never worn a necktie until today.

It is my honor and great privilege as the Writer/Editor/Digital Publisher of LongShortStories to announce the winners of the second LongShortStories Short Story Contest!

 Competition was fierce! Submissions arrived from all over the globe! We carefully read and evaluated every one of them! We want to thank our friends at the Duotrope’s Digest Web site for steering many of you to our Web site and its contests.

 Our prizes were fantastic! First Prize was a complete Eugene Barnes Basic Website Package and 6-month basic level fully managed Web hosting service, valued at approximately $800. Our Second Prize was $150 cash and a free One Year subscription (or renewal) to LongShortStories. Our Third Prize was $100 cash and a free One Year subscription (or renewal) to LongShortStories.

 The quality of submissions ranged from the absolutely wonderful to the quite awful! Word counts ranged from 2500-word short stories to power-packed, take-no-prisoners Flash Fiction pieces, some less than 200 words!

 A word to those of you who did not win one of our prizes this time around: You’re all winners in our book! Now it is 2010, a new decade, and you may submit your new, original, previously unpublished short fiction to us (no simultaneous submissions, please!) between January 1, 2010 and June 30, 2010, and/or enter our contest which runs from July 1, 2010 through December 31, 2010.

 We would suggest you continue honing your short story craft by following this advice:

 Read, read, and read again from the best! Study the living masters of the short story form, like Alice Munro, Stephen King, Annie Proulx, Sherman Alexie, Bruce Holland Rogers, Benjamin Percy, and those found in the pages of each year’s The Best American Short Stories. Study the classic short works of Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allan Poe, Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and other masters of the short story form who have gone before. Dissect their work. Emulate them. Create your own genre!

 Watch those typos, misspellings, and grammatical mistakes! Sadly, far too many of you relied on your spell-checkers. Register for a short fiction course. Invest in a copy of 30 Days to a More Powerful Vocabulary. Learn how to punctuate dialogue! You’ll be glad you did!

 Edit, edit, edit! Get that story idea down on paper! Then read it out loud to yourself. Is there a pleasing rhythm to your prose? Do we care about your characters? Does your dialogue ring true? Then, watch your point of view and story development. Does it make strategic use of pacing? Does it follow the “less is more” winning short story structure? In the immortal words of Antoine de Saint Exupéry: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away!”

 Now, let us celebrate our winners!

 LongShortStories is very proud to award our distinguished First Prize to Mike Jaynes of Chattanooga, Tennessee, for his 2,330-word short story “Gasoline Christmas.” This short story just blew us away with its creepiness and its tortured main character’s stoical determination. We were so swept up by this entry that our knee-jerk reaction was to consider calling the police!

 LongShortStories is equally proud to announce that our esteemed Second Prize goes to Kendra Lisum of Missoula, Montana, for her 150-word Flash Fiction story “Neckties and Lilacs.” Kendra’s bio and her cutting-edge story will appear on these “Wayne’s Blog” pages on February 16, 2010. Mark your calendars!

 After much gnashing of teeth and sleepless nights here at LongShortStories, we finally decided that we hadn’t found a story truly worthy of our Third Prize this time around. Keep writing, people, and try again! Some of the masters had their work initially rejected too! Remember that we at LongShortstories are here to foster the magnificent short story form; a writing form deemed by experts the world over as the most difficult of all forms to write. A form whose time to shine for an appreciative global audience is now!

Spotlight on Mike Jaynes!

Mike Jaynes is an American Short Story Writer living in the Southeastern United States. He is a university lecturer who teaches various English, Humanities, and Women’s Studies courses at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He is currently working on a collection of short stories and a non-fiction book focusing on captive elephants and animal advocacy. Relatedly, he also lectures across the United States on the troubling and complex subject of animal ethics.

In his short fiction, he seeks to write sparse terrifying stories. His fiction and non-fiction work has appeared in Farmhouse Magazine, The Riverwalk Journal, Wordriver Literary Review, Four Corners Magazine, National Public Radio’s This I Believe Essay Series, All Creatures and other outlets.

 And now, friends of LongShortStories, Mike Jaynes’ First Prize-winning short story:

Gasoline Christmas

A Story

 Children never make eye contact with me. Christmas is just about here again, and there is plenty of red and green changing the landscape into a magical place. I love Christmas; it makes me feel happy.  I hate Christmas; it makes me crave the coppery smell of blood.  I need to find the place I’m supposed to drop off these apples. Trust me, not most people’s dream, my job, but it suits me fine. Sometimes I want to hurt people.  Most people are busy with Quite Important Things, and I try to avoid those.  Who imagines the typical American child saying Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be an apple delivery man? People want to grow up and be doctors, lawyers, pro surfers, or first basemen for the Red Sox. 

But deliverers of apples?

Drivers of farm trucks? Sometimes people seem like hollow sculptures endowed with pointless movement.  But my job works for me because I am trying my hardest to balance myself. Sometimes I hate breathing the same air as other humans, but I have it under control now because I think a lot about balance and I know I require it.  Also, I have been happy. I have spent entire days lying under my favorite tree watching the shadows of the slowly passing day play out on its bark.  I have sat under night skies and listened to distant hunting night birds and felt the warm essence of stars.  I’ll never be famous.

Apples ride with me.

Red ones, yellow ones, baking ones, but mainly red delicious.  The farm I drive for specializes in red delicious, and sometimes I want to see just how much C-4 could fit under the first two pews of the biggest Baptist church in town.  But then I calm down and realize that things are perfect as they are and even if the world seems mad, the universe is perfect.  Balanced.  Most nights I lie under needles of night sky mica chips and listen to the universe. So far, nothing. 

I don’t have any friends.

I used to be in love with a girl.  But I hurt her and kept screwing up and she had enough and left. Then I was in love with a man and it ended the same way. They used to be happy, but I destroyed them.  They still walk around and do things, but they are destroyed. I only have about forty minutes for lunch, so I park my blue farm truck in the Waffle House parking lot.  I eat here often, and a few of the waitresses know me. None of them like me. The door creaks, swings, and lets me in.  The restaurant isn’t crowded, it being two-twenty on a Tuesday.  I hate the names of the weeks.  I hate clocks and divisions of time.  The door closes behind me, and I am overwhelmed by the orange, yellow and brown of the decor.

Hey there, Dolores says.

Workin’ hard, Dolores? I say.

Only if they make me. She chuckles.

I know that’s right, I reply. I sit in the cold plastic booth, and think about chapter 29 of the Tao Te Ching. Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it?  I do not believe it can be done. That’s what it says, chapter 29.  Delores brings me a coffee.

You up to no good today? She asks.  Good question, I think.

You know me, I say. Good answer.  I order my regular, and she walks away. Less and less is done until non-action is achieved.  Outside the holiday-painted windows, a mall sprawls just across the parking lot.  Cars dot the landscape, people are hurried, and I marvel at the progress of humanity through holiday windows showing me Santa Claus, reindeer, and candy canes all in dull reverse.  The top of the windows say syadiloH yppaH.  I feel festive.  I have to be back at work in a little over thirty minutes, and the restaurant is filled with the usual sounds of clinking forks, refilling teas, shouting orders, and properly functioning door chimes.

Three years ago, on the night she left, she called me a fraud. She asked me about the tyranny within me, and I didn’t like that at all.  Sometimes the world is burning inside me and I don’t want it to. This holiday season has a theme of peace, and I plan to tap into a little of that as soon as possible.  She brought me such joy at times, and then there were other times.  Sometimes I was happy with her, and then sometimes I felt my veins leaving my body, traveling upwards and strangling me. My very veins, bluish and hollow, with me from my beginning, I felt them exit my skin, slither up my body, and strangle me.  A gallows of thick, bluish veins knotted together in a fleshy noose. Strangling me.  Choking. Can’t breathe.

No. Stop. I think. Control. I always think I can control it. There’s no reason to feel this. I vaguely remember sneaking into the crawl space below the Waffle House three nights ago. But what was I doing? I can’t remember why I was crawling under the restaurant, putting soft grey things here and there. Stop it. No idea at all. No reason to go back down this path when it is crisp outside, the sky is blue, and Dolores just sat a plate of double hash browns, just the way I like them, in front of me.  My pulse slows.  I can always think my way back to calmness. The noose of my thick waxy veins loosens and I can breathe a little better. What were those wires I ran under the building three nights ago? The dream fades. 

The food is delicious, Christmas is almost here, and it is good to be alive.  The food is warm and good.  The hash browns are hot and tinged with jalapeños. The ketchup is good too. Through the inverted red and green images of holiday icons, I see the vista of the parking lot mall dotted with cars and I suddenly want to destroy them all.  I want to stuff rags down their gas tanks and light them. Stop. I stop chewing and close my eyes. Burn them. The sound of the restaurant continues. Frying bacon, sizzling sausage, the low hum in my left ear. Stop it. I think of slaughterhouses, not bacon. I looked out the front row of windows and I saw my work truck silent and waiting for me to turn the key and go back to work. After lunch, I will get in and turn the key. Control. Start the engine. Going somewhere. The hum in my ears gets louder and I put my hands to my ears. I am the one who parked that truck full of apples. I want to rejoice in the backward snowman painted on the Waffle House window like children do. I want to smile when I see his painted grin and his arms lifted in greeting. I want to ignore the freight train full of rotting animals whose death I caused. I want to ignore its roaring in my head and enjoy simple pleasures like hot hash browns and cold sweet tea on my lunch break. I notice Delores is standing beside me saying something. I put my hands down, and try to look composed. I fail. 

Buddy, you okay? she asked with deeper lines visible on her face. I avoid eye contact. I realize this may be the first thing other than small talk we’ve ever shared.  I hear the low hum; I know those grey packets are below the restaurant…below this very booth, and that one, and the grill, and the restrooms over there. Godhood flows over me and I mourn the person dying inside of me.

I say Yes.  I just get these crushing migraines sometimes that come out of nowhere.  I’m fine, I assure her.  I’m a fine liar. Sometimes I eat apples from my truck and don’t pay for them. That’s wrong.  Delores looks scared.  I never look in mirrors.  I am alone. I know about the wires underneath us all.  I start to laugh.

Baby, maybe you ought to calm down, she says.  Delores turns up the corners of her mouth, but she is not smiling.  I stop laughing and want to destroy.  I want them to burn in metal fields of burning holiday presents and families and dreams. I want everyone in the mall dead.  Dead and gone.  Everybody in the Waffle House. I want to die. My mother would be ashamed. I wish I had Rusty, my dog from childhood. But he died.

You want to hear a story, Delores? I asked.  She didn’t.  She glances at her manager who is standing just beside her.  Other people are looking now and I don’t care.  I can get this under control by thinking about what needs to be done. I am a thinker.

Can I call you somebody? She asks. She looks at my shaking hands. My fork clanks on the cheap plate with its corona of blue. I feel nauseous. 

Delores, there is nobody. I want to tell you a story. Can I? My voice sounds higher pitched than usual.  I continue: I just want to tell you this story and then I will leave, I say.  I want to hold Delores’s face to the hot griddle and listen to her flesh hiss secrets at me.  Hear her fat face sizzle? Maybe in a minute.

She just wants me to shut up and leave.  She speaks. Okay, honey.  Tell me a story. She won’t like the story.

Well, Delores, when I was fourteen I had this dream.  And it scared me, you know.  And now and then I think of it and it scares me and I try to not think of what it might mean.  I want you to tell me what it might mean, I say.  My voice is high and fast.  She starts to speak but my words bowl her over, run her down, stop her in her tracks.  I am a force of nature, sitting at a Waffle House table craving the smell of burnt flesh and twisted metal and gasoline Christmas.  My rage overpowers her good intentions and I continue: You see, I had this dream that I woke up and I killed my parents, I say.  Delores looked pale now. She should. You all should.  In my high voice I say Then I went from house to house in my neighborhood in the pre-dawn stillness and killed everyone in my neighborhood.  The Joneses, The Smiths, The Adrianics. All of them.  Now I can feel myself sweating and I know Delores is scared. My voice rises in pitch and gains intensity.  Everyone in the restaurant is listening.  I continued: So, after that I killed everyone in our town.  The whole town, and then I blew up the entire state.  All of Tennessee dead by my calm hands.  Then I killed everyone in America, Europe, and the world.  All the plants, the animals, the birds, the fish, the microbes in the soil.  If it lived, I killed it. I blew the world up and then I went to distant planets and killed them all there too.  I destroyed all life in the universe.  I killed it all and I was still hungry for more.  I wasn’t satisfied.  I prayed, and God and Jesus came to me and said they forgive me and they love me and I killed them both and ate them.  I ate them with one of those plastic spoon fork things from KFC.  Then I realized there was no life left in the universe so I destroyed all the planets, all the stars, all the comets. We were studying physics and the universe in junior high, and in my dream I killed all the quasars, the meteorites, and even the black holes.  I destroyed all the matter in the universe and then there was only darkness and me.  Then I hated the darkness.  I killed it too. I sucked it up through a long straw and it was cold going down my throat and it made me feel empty instead of full.  So then I sucked up all the darkness and behind it was the void.  I killed it too.  And the void behind it and the void behind it and the void behind it.  I knew that I would never be able to kill all the voids in the universe and I was pissed because I knew I would spend eternity killing and sucking the vacuum of nothingness through a long straw and feeling cold and empty and pissed and alone.  Then I realized as long as anything existed there would be something and I wouldn’t be happy.  I killed myself and then I ate my body.  My soul flew in the void and I hated it too. I wanted to kill my soul, but I couldn’t. I am immortal in the dream and I know that I annihilated everything in the universe but I can’t kill myself. And I realized I had to spend eternity alone in an unbroken blackness with nothing at all.

The restaurant is silent, my story finished. I stand up, put twenty dollars on the table, and walk to my truck. I can barely see and I am shaking as I pull out of the parking lot with my truck loaded with apples. As I pull away, I see the cook standing at the plate glass staring at me and my receding apples. Then I push the blue button on the detonator in my hand and the middle of the store turns into a growing fireball rolling out and up and over the yellow and brown roof. Those buttons are always red in the movies, the ones on detonators.

 The End.

Story Copyright of Mike Jaynes, 2009.

LongShortStories Editor’s Note:

Mr. Jaynes wishes to foster other deserving short story writers by humbly passing on the Web site prize package to future potential LongShortStories First Prize winners. This, to us, is the ultimate in authorial selflessness. Kudos, Mike!

LongShortStories launches its Christmas Collaborators short story give-away contest today — December 3, 2009!

“Tell us more, Wayne, tell us more!” pipe in the LongShortStories elves!

“Yes, Boss, tell everyone how we’ll give away FIVE FREE One-Year short story subscriptions to some VERY good writers out there!” chimes in Gabby Carolina, the new Plott Hound dog in the LongShortStories short story holiday workshop.

Ok, guys, settle down! Here’s how it works!

Today, I will write an opening paragraph here for the LongShortStories Christmas Collaborators Contest. You, the global short story writing community will add the next paragraphs as “Comments” to this posting as they come in from far and wide.

When Christmas Day arrives in Wisconsin, U.S.A., I will choose the FIVE most creative comment-paragraph writers who participated in our holiday contest. And then I will add the ending paragraph to the story we all created!

What fun! Ho ho ho ho ho ho!

Here we gooooooooo!

Santa’s tears fell like melting permafrost upon his ample, crimson-covered lap. Christmas, 2009, would be like no other Christmas in recorded history!

Today in America, we celebrated Thanksgiving. An official day off to count our blessings. Turkey and stuffing. Family.

Life for this writer has been filled with blessings for which I am exceedingly grateful to my Creator.

Let me take this opportunity to thank all of you who fortuitously landed on this Web site and its blog.

I know you come here for different reasons.

Some, to enter the LongShortStories Contests.

Some, to get a quick tutorial about what constitutes a great short story.

Others come here to read the free samples.

And then there are those of you who come here to subscribe.

All of you are important to me!

All of you make my day complete!

All of you … matter!

Thank you, today and every day!

Wayne C. Long
Writer/Editor/Digital Publisher
www.LongShortStories.com
Where the Short Story LIVES!

Before you know it, Christmas and Hanuka will be here!

What better way to show your friends and loved ones that you care than by giving them a LongShortStories subscription!

Simply send me an e-mail with “Gift Subscription Request” in your subject line and I will take care of everything.

Please include the following information:

First and last name of you, the giver.

First and last name of person you want to give subscription to.

E-mail address of person you want to give subscription to.

Holiday message to be included from you to them.

Select either
ONE-Year LongShortStories gift (30 stories) at $12 USD or
TWO-Year LongShortStories gift (60 stories) at $20 USD.

I will advise you by return e-mail how to make your Gift Subscription secure payment.

Easy, secure, and it’s GREEN!

Give the gift of reading this year!

Give LongShortStories!

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce a good friend of LongShortStories.

Brad Vertrees is a blogger, aspiring writer, vegetarian and a lover of all things literature. His blog, Brad’s Reader, found at www.bradsreader.com, has been going strong since December 2006 as a platform to discuss literature and writing. Since then, Brad’s Reader has evolved to include how technology is shaping the publishing industry, and provides a platform for Brad to indulge in his latest passion – ebooks.

Currently Brad lives with his wife and cat in the suburbs of Chicago. Aside from blogging, Brad also works as a freelance writer. Let’s give him a BIG LongShortStories welcome!

Resurrecting the Short Story

 Before the Internet, computers, cell phones and most of the technology we take for granted today, there were newspapers and magazines that kept people entertained. Those were the days when writers could make a living by selling their short fiction to magazines and receive a decent paycheck. They didn’t get rich from short fiction alone, but it allowed budding authors to hone their craft without worrying about paying the bills.

 Today, a writer is lucky to get paid for publishing a short story in a magazine. Most publications pay in contributor copies. If the author does get paid, it rarely exceeds $100. And if one writes a novel and is lucky enough to get it published, there’s no guarantee that they will make a livable wage.

 It’s ironic that the technology that drove out print magazines and newspapers also brought in a new era for the short story – a renaissance of sorts. The growing popularity of ebooks and related ebook reading devices hitting the market provides writers a perfect opportunity to distribute their work to a growing audience without going through mainstream publishing channels.

 How does this affect the short story? The answer is that digital publishing is made for short fiction. People who read ebooks, especially on mobile devices, can read a piece of short fiction while waiting at the doctor’s office, sitting in a coffee shop, or just wanting a quick read without plowing through a novel. In other words, short stories allow readers to easily get their ‘quick fix’ of fiction.

 For example, I like reading short stories by science fiction author Philip K. Dick on my iPhone. These are stories that I would not have otherwise read in print form. I find myself reading in places I usually don’t read – like in long checkout lines at the grocery store.

 Abundance of websites for short fiction

 Now that ebooks are becoming more and more mainstream, there are many websites that give readers a chance to read a diverse range of fiction that would otherwise be inaccessible. This site, LongShortStories, is a perfect example of the entrepreneurial spirit that writers should adopt to get their short fiction out to the masses. Wayne has used an excellent model that allows people to either subscribe to his fiction, or buy stories individually.

 Other sites, such as Smashwords and Feedbooks, give readers a choice of different ebook formats, allowing short fiction to be disseminated to a large audience. New websites that distribute digital fiction are popping up all over the Internet. Some specialize in short fiction, others in genre novels and even poetry. Readers now have a large collection of literature at their fingertips waiting to be read and enjoyed.

 Short story writers also benefit from ebooks

 The rise of digital publishing has leveled the playing field for writers. They now have more control over their work, where it’s distributed, its pricing, and they get to keep a larger share of the profits. When an author publishes a short story with a literary magazine or other publication, they get a flat rate whether the publication sells 1 copy or 1,000 copies.

 With short story writers now enjoying this independence, the market for fresh blood is opening to fill the literary world that was once open to a select few. In fact, writers today have a better chance to make a living off their work than ever before. Even during the golden era of short fiction, when the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald made a handsome living selling stories to the Saturday Evening Post and others, he was still at the mercy of those publications in regards to payment and distribution channels.

 The distribution channels available to print publications are limited. They must think in terms of paper supply, printing costs, shipping to retailers and the cost of mailing their publication to subscribers. For the short story writer using digital publishing, once the story is written, edited and formatted, there is an infinite supply. This means selling one digital short story costs the same as selling 2,000. The benefit to the writer is a much higher profit margin.

 Short stories are back because of ebooks

 For a long time the short story was considered dead, reduced to a select group of consumers who tilted heavily toward the literary side of fiction. Now, thanks to ebooks, short stories are making a big comeback and in the next few years we could see this literary form become even more popular than ever.

 If you’re a writer with a dream of writing the great American novel (a very noble dream indeed) consider starting with short fiction and selling it in ebook form. If you already have a novel (or novels) published, short fiction is a good way to promote your writing at a smaller cost to the reader and enticing them to buy your novel.

 If you’re a reader then there is a gold mine of great writing out there waiting to be discovered. The number of great writers waiting to be discovered is astounding. Take a chance on them. Buy their digital short fiction and support these indie authors. You never know when an unknown writer is going to hit the jackpot with a bestselling novel and you can say you discovered that writer before the large publishing houses.

In keeping with the Obama Administration’s Economic Stimulus Plan, we at LongShortStories are very pleased to announce that, effective September 1, 2009, it will now be FREE to enter your short story submissions.

We know times are tough. And we know that there are some excellent short story writers out there who need a break, a FREE chance to make it into the big-time world of being a published writer.

We have some fabulous prizes for the First, Second, and Third-place winners, so don’t delay another minute!

Enter the current LongShortStories Short Story Contest. Your next submittal deadline is December 31, 2009.

Good luck to everyone!

Wayne C. Long
Writer/Editor/Internet Publisher
www.LongShortStories.com
Where the Short Story LIVES!

It is said that “art begets art.”

As a short story writer, I find that to be so true.

I find great inspiration in listening to great classical music. Composers, after all, are writers employing musical notation. They translate words into sonic stimulation.

Today, I would like to introduce you to another kind of amazing artist, my StumbleUpon friend, Bill M. Tracer.

Bill is not only a visually creative genius but he is also an accomplished writer.

Friends, meet Bill:

Bill M. Tracer is a freelance computer graphic artist, and science fiction / fantasy / paranormal writer, living in Cordova , TN , USA . Regarding his art, he works with a variety of digital computer graphic software on a PC, ranging from 3D illustration, to cosmic and spiritual abstraction, to fractal geometric generation. Among other places you’ll find his art on-line are his gallery Web site located at: http://billmtracerstudio.50megs.com/ , a DeviantART Gallery at: http://billmtracer.deviantart.com/gallery/ , and Picable http://www.picable.com/photographers/Bill%20M.%20Tracer.13377/recent . Just click thumbnail to enlarge to full size.

To contact Bill for commission work or if you’re interested in any art prints of his work drop him an e-mail at: billmtracer@comcast.net

With his permission, I have chosen to spotlight three of Bill’s outstanding copyrighted art works below for your enjoyment.

Study these works.

Ponder them.

And then conjure up your award-winning short story entry for the LongShortStories Short Story Contest. You, too, will find that art begets art!

“Ambrosia Rising Variation Three”

“A Floating Fractal City Variation One”

“Tree of Introspection from the Abstract Applique’ Series”

See what I mean when I say “art begets art!”

Thank you, Bill, for sharing your world with ours.

You have “the gift,” my friend!

Wayne C. Long

Writer/Editor/Internet Publisher

www.LongShortStories.com

Where the Short Story LIVES!

That is the title of a marvelous 256-page paperback book by Dr. Wilfred Funk and Norman Lewis.

Take it from me, this book should be on every short story writer’s bookshelf.

You may think you can write, but your vocabulary will give you away every time!

Amazon sells this book for only $6.99.

I want to hear your after-action reports telling me how much this book enriched your short fiction vocabulary.

What are you waiting for?

Wayne C. Long
Writer/Editor/Internet Publisher
www.LongShortStories.com
Where the Short Story LIVES!

That is so true.

I’m a very busy writer, pumping out a brand-new short story every 12 days. But in order to keep up this creative momentum, a busy writer needs to keep his/her ear to the proverbial “ground” to stay way ahead of the reading public’s likes and dislikes. And to hack new genre trails where none were before

I read short stories for pleasure, for ideas, even for selfish business reasons, to monitor the competition.

That being said, what short story have YOU enjoyed lately (and by what author)?

What about that short story kept your interest to the end?

I also want to use today’s post to ask you avid short story readers an important question:

If you could step into my writer’s shoes for a day, what previously untold story theme would you want to see on the digital page (and why)?

Your feedback, with your name and country of origin, will be much appreciated. If I develop your short story idea, I will publish it on www.LongShortStories.com for the world to see, giving you written credit for your idea. You will also receive a One-Year subscription to LongShortStories!

I look forward to hearing from you before August 31, 2009, on this blog page.

Thanks much!

Wayne C. Long

Writer/Editor/Internet Publisher

www.LongShortStories.com

Where the Short Story LIVES!