Category: Writing

  • Just Some General Bitching (Unedited)

    I’m having a hard time getting myself motivated. To do anything, really.

    Doesn’t help that I got two rejections in the last twenty-four hours. But this is part of the gig; Lots of rejection, and trying to not let it get to you. I’m at the point now where I am beginning to think that the story really isn’t that great. Or it needs a rewrite. Or maybe I just need to burn it and rid it’s presence from my life.

    The other thing is that I have spent the past hour catching up on my flash reading. I subscribe to a large number of online journals who email out flash fiction, and I have fallen behind of late, or the whole Summer. Anyway, I’m trying to get on top of it, and see what is worth reviewing. Nothing has been peaking my interest, and I started to think maybe it’s not the fiction, but me. Maybe my head isn’t in the right space for this.

    Time to take a break.

    More like changing gears, because here I am working on the blog. I have to get in my 1,000 words a day. (You know, it’s not so much writing as it is typing, and I think somewhere Truman Capote is laughing with me.) The only way to get better at something is practice. Practice! PRACTICE!

    As I sit here, I remember once, maybe back in college or sometime in my past, there was this writer complaining how much they hated blogs and bloggers. They said it was useless writing as all bloggers do is bitch about things in badly written ways. I don’t think writer was totally wrong.

    Yet, I feel that someone needs to sit down here and take a stand to say that some writing should just bitching, complaints, and listing of grievances. Isn’t bitching a form of expression?

    Sure, it would be better if I could string this expression in a clear narrative form, that has a well-defined beginning, middle, and end – with that end being a wonderful conclusion the initial thought. That would be nice and clean and concise.

    But life is messy and not clean, and sometimes this human experience is muddy, and gross, and undefined and rough and jagged. And uses bad grammar and has typos or type-o’s, or however one would spell that word.

    Sometimes you just got to get it off your chest to move on. And sometimes you want to scream into the void that a blog. A testament, a covenant that this moment existed, and was real, and had a value to no one else other than the person who wrote it.

    There you go.

  • A Summer Rainy Day Does Me No Good

    I have chores, like every day of my life, which I feel compelled to complete first before I can go out and work on the things that are important to me. There are holes to this system, other people have pointed it out to me, but I will argue on the whole it works. Every system can be improved, but what I have gets the job done.

    Except when it’s a rainy day. Like a full, gray cloudy sky day, when it feels like rain, smells like rain, and keeps raining. Summer rainy days are the worst. It’s all hot and humid outside, so it doubly makes me not want to go outside. (Autumn and Spring rainy days are at least classic, and charming. They make you want to stay inside and read.) There is very little enjoyment in going out in a hot sticky humid gross smelly Summer rainy day.

    Today was a Summer rainy day, and though the calendar says September 1st, the start of the Autumnal months, it is still Summer out. The air conditioner is still running, and will be for a week or two more.

    But I did my running around in the rain. Shopped groceries for the family, which meant that I was running up and down, all over Harlem, hitting up three different stores to get everything that we need for the week. I got a little wet, nothing awful, but I had on a raincoat, which was just an extra layer on top of an already icky day – the end result was that I was sweating while getting rained on.

    Now, I have earned my goal and have returned to the end of the couch to work on my work, and even get some reading in. Now, the rain out the window feels appropriate, and fairly measured.

  • Summer Break is Over

    Before I had a kid, and was a young adult running around New York City, the framework dates for Summer were simple; It lasted from Memorial Day to Labor Day. After Memorial Day, it felt like the City emptied out, and then the day after Labor Day, the City filled back up. And that was how I thought of Summer in those days.

    After having a kid, “Summer” returned to the definition it had when I was a child; Summer was from when school ended, to when school started up again. It didn’t fit neatly into the Memorial/Labor Day bookends, because the school bookends feel correct.

    Which brings me to say that Summer is over as the kid is back in school.

    And this was an okay Summer. Nothing amazing, but still fun. We did some road trips as a family, visiting Vermont and West Virginia. The kid went to her sleep away camp, which allowed all of us to enjoy a break from each other, and as enjoy reuniting as a family again.

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    (Here I am about to go four-wheelin’ in Vermont.)

    Creatively, I took a break this Summer. I kept up the journal, but decided that I should have a break from the blog, reviews, and fiction. I thought it best to catch up on reading, and start thinking about what I want to accomplish for the last half of the year. I did work a little on a novel, but it was more an exercise of fun, and not meant to be anything more than that.

    So, here I sit, writing a blog on the couch, a stack of books on the end table, and a crap ton of short stories clogging up my Inbox that need to be read and possibly reviewed. Then there are the stories I need to finish writing, and then proceed to submit to all the lit journals across the internets.

    Which leads me to say, I am looking forward to Autumn!

  • Flash Fiction Review – “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney

    (The flash fiction story “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney was published on March 19th, 2026 at Milk Candy Review.)

    “Two days after I died” by Justine Sweeney is the type of flash piece that makes me love flash writers as they can be inventive and playful with this form, while at the same time making me ask, in a mischievous way, “What did I just read?”

    In “Two days after I dies” Justine Sweeny gives to us the character of a recently realized ghost. I love that this spirit is frantic and unhinged – tethered to this world, either unable or unwilling to leave it. Sweeny uses effectively simple techniques here; lack of capitalization, run-on sentences, and short words that make a choppy, staccato rhythm to the piece. What the writer creates is a spirit’s frenzied attempt to get all of these words out and tell us this self-perceived vitally important story. There is an anger to this ghost. A viciousness in her as she is annoyed that someone she doesn’t know well would dare post a personal reflection of her passing on social media. There is a hint at humor in the beginning, but as the fury builds, the tone begins to switch to an unhealthy bitterness which is out of proportion to the allegedly aggrieved crime. Take how the ghost lists all the offenses of this woman. Though the ghost sees the offenses as unforgivable transgressions, we start to feel a sense of jealousness in the comparison of their motherly actions. And when the twist arrives at the end, it lands with pity, and a disbelief that one, even in the afterlife, is so wrapped and warped in grievance, lacking the empathy to acknowledge that there is one person they cared about suffering in their mourning. But most haunting is how this ghost seems to lack even the slightest hint of remorse or regret that she is no longer with her children.

    Sweeney’s “Two days after I died” is a very short and compacted work, but it left me with wonderful questions to roll over in my head. Was the woman who posted on social media really affected to the degree that she claimed, or was it as the ghost suspected, a bit of online grief porn? Can one’s anger and bitterness make a person completely blind to their loved ones suffering? Can animosity and hostility follow us into the next world? Clearly, the theme was meant to apply to us in the here and now, but “Two days after I died” is a succinct rumination of the metaphysical possibility that a life lived unwell, will leave you emotionally untethered in spitefulness.

  • It’s Summer Vacation, and I’m Bored… (Unedited)

    We are on day two of the kid’s summer vacation, and this morning I was told by my daughter that there is nothing to do, and she’s bored.

    Ah, yes. The dreaded but completely expected statement which I knew was only a matter of time before it was uttered.

    I know that this is a sticky debate for some parents. There is one camp which is “Let the kids be bored” as that will teach them to make their own fun. The downside to this stance is that most kids, mine included, will go running to a screen… so not so much a win there.

    The other camp is to schedule the kid to do stuff, and keep the boredom away. The two downsides on this one is that parent is solving the problem and not the kid. The second point is that activities can be expensive.

    I’m trying to find a balance in the middle. I want the kid to solve her own boredom issue without running to a screen, which means that we have to set screen limits. The other side is that this might be one of my last summers to do stuff with the kid around the City, and I don’t want to pass up the opportunity to spend time with her.

    There is one other thing. If I’m spending my time with the kid, that means I don’t get a chance to work on my writing. (I only have four minutes left before I have to go off and make everyone lunch.) I’m trying to figure out a way that we can sit in front of the TV and watch the World Cup together, and I can work on some things, but that is an awful plan as I get wrapped up in talking to the kid, or watching the match.

    I also have to remind myself that the way I grew up, is nothing like the way my kid is growing up. I grew up in a suburb outside of Dallas that was full of families and kids, so every summer, I could run out of the house, and find another kid to go and do something with, and never leave the block. My daughter’s friends are spread out all over the City, and each kid goes to a different type of school, so not everyone’s vacations line up. She really can’t run out the door and play.

    Anyway… Today, we are going to kick the soccer ball in the park and draw on the couch as we watch the World Cup. That should do the trick for today.