Third Street Writers, a California enterprise, invited short-short stories on the theme of “adrift”. I imagined a girl who lost her paddle while kayaking, and  awaits a hero to rescue her. Third Street didn’t like it, but The Writer’s Club did; you can read it ==>here

I can’t remember what prompted this bit of flash fiction. I first wrote it under the title “Promises,” drawing on more than one state legislator I’ve known who couldn’t quite evade leadership’s arm-twisting on one bill or another. Nobody took it, so after a while I did a very minor rewrite and began sending it out as “Independence”. The Writer’s Club took it; you can read it ==>>here

Pandemonium Press, in California, publishes three oddly-named online magazines. One of them, riverbabble, took my “Sirens” two years ago. Another, Doorknobs & Body Paint, last winter invited short-short (450-word) stories featuring descriptions of hard work. We’d just had a good Connecticut snowstorm; I’d gone out to be sure the men hard at work clearing our courtyard shovelled up to my patio door to accommodate my dog. I whipped out a little vignette, called it “A Path for Peanut”, and sent it out. Hardly great literature, but fun; an exercise in painting word pictures.

They didn’t take it.

In October Doorknobs had a new invitation: Short-shorts set in Bern, with a sub-theme of transcend, and somewhere using the the phrase considered as. It took maybe an hour to give my courtyard a view of the Swiss Alps, meet the other criteria, and re-name the piece “Une Piste pour Le Petit.”

Bingo! You can read it online — and find some other quirky pieces — at the Doorknobs website ==>>here

and find some other quirky pieces elsewhere in issue # 96

(It’s also right here at my blog.)

“We are here,” wrote the editor, “to explore the human condition . . . .  submit anything that explores your life views, existence, mortality, spirituality, conflict, and more.”

So the oddly-named online magazine Cleaning Up Glitter planned a different kind of October/Halloween issue. I had written, years ago, a slightly fictionalized account of a memorial service I’d attended, that I’d titled “Seeing Charlie Off.”  She liked it; you can read it ==>>here

We’re all surely aware of how much privacy we yield whenever we go online. Suppose, I wondered one day, that our smartphones actually gave reports to Big Brother periodically; what might that conversation sound like?

I called the resulting short-short story Surveillance. Burningword Literary Magazine’s editor liked it; you can read it ==>>here

Zimbell House, which has taken several of my earlier works, invited short stories on a theme of “secrets in the water.” Initially, as I thought of all the rivers and oceans I’ve known, nothing came to mind.
But then I remembered fishing for shad at what used to be the Enfield Dam on the Connecticut River (which has since collapsed). There’s a secret to getting shad to take a hook, since they don’t eat anything on their way upriver. Secrets to tying flies. Maybe other secrets would develop. I started writing, but it took weeks for a story arc to take shape.
Although I suspect the editors were expecting stories of pirates, mermaids and selkies (Scottish mythological seals that take human form), they liked my more prosaic secret enough to include it among 31 in an anthology Secrets in the Water,” available today at Amazon and other booksellers. You can also read it ==>here

I’m not a fan a super-short fiction, but every now and then I’m drawn to the challenge. An online litmag, 50-Word Stories, wants EXACTLY 50 words. I did something called Earthworm Ruminations that they liked two years ago; this time around I concocted an ending to a real-life Noel family mystery that remains in fact unsolved: What happened to Brad’s family-history engagement ring? Read the fictional answer ==>>here