Category Archives: A Writing Life

180. Exiled on Stormking

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Every science fiction writer has his own style. Mine is built around stories that take place in the near future, in which I try to imagine what would actually happen. Stories of far flung galactic empires or invasions by advanced life forms are certainly legitimate, and I occasionally like to read them. But I write about what I think is most likely to actually happen.

That calls for choices and the most basic is, will or won’t mankind find a practical, artificial immortality. I can’t think of a more basic divergence in fictional timelines. If we do, then events in A Fond Farewell to Dying and its two sequels strike me as entirely logical, even likely.

If not, then we are likely to go on breeding and increasing in population. We are also likely to explore our tiny corner of the galaxy before anyone perfects a faster than light drive. None of our present technologies would allow that. There are a dozen possibilities under consideration, but I am neither impressed nor interested. As I said in 23. Star Drives, it seems more likely that something out there which no one has thought of yet will slap humanity in the face and completely change physics.

You don’t think so? I suggest that you read some of the history of science. Science usually gets things right, but it seems to chase a whole battalion of wild geese first. In the short run, whatever is believed today is likely to be disproved tomorrow. Clinging too tightly to current doctrine is no way to predict the future.

In Cyan, an off stage character named Lassiter discovers that gravity has an inhibiting effect on the conversion of matter to energy. Do I believe that is so? Of course not. I do believe that we are due for a game changer fully as outré as that sometime in the next fifty years. Set your clock.

Cyan, due out momentarily, sets the stage for the exploration of nearby stars at relativistic speeds. While we are exploring Cyan around Procyon, off stage we learn a little about the planetary resources of Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti. and Epsilon Indi. Call it world building times six, it is a setup for a series of novels.

The first sequel to Cyan, plotted but not yet written, will be called Stormking or Dreamsinger, probably the latter. Stormking is a planet around Sirius A. Perturbation from Sirius B have given it a Uranian tilt, although paleontological evidence shows that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The human colony lives in space habitats; they are beltmen from Sol’s asteroid belt who have escaped Earth’s destruction. They chose Sirius because Stormking, the only planet in the sweet spot for human life, if basically uninhabitable.

These refugees traveled to Sirius to avoid planetbounds, but during the crowded, decades long journey they had to embrace either fierceness or civility. The former would have killed them, but choosing the latter weakened their spirit.

They no longer tolerate deviations from the norm, yet they are too civil to institute punishment. What choice remains? They send their deviants into exile on Stormking.

Most of them died. A few lived and had children. By the opening of our story, most of the population of Stormking was born there. They have violated no laws, but their rough natures will not allow them to be repatriated.

Antrim, who has been tagged to act as anthropologist and study these children of outlaws, has just arrived on Stormking. He will learn more than he could ever imagine.

179. Wrong Direction

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One of my favorite professors at Michigan State was no fan of statistics. He called it “sadistics”. That makes some sense; statistics had little to offer to Anthropology those days. The data statisticians had available to crunch was highly questionable in origin and accuracy.

My old prof called their work “generating ignorance”. I’ve always loved that phrase, and it fits today’s presidential pollsters perfectly, at least as far as this question is concerned.

     THE COUNTRY IS GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.
     YES
     NO
     Circle one response.

If you wanted to circle NO, I’ll either let you read it again, or buy you a ticket on the bus to Sunnybrook Farm. Almost everybody thinks the country is going in the wrong direction. But why? There are a thousand possible reasons.

There is too much restriction on a woman’s right to choose.
Abortion is too freely available.
Obama is an idiot.
All Democrats are idiots.
All Republicans are idiots.
Bernie is the only politician with a brain.
Bernie is a communist.
The Federal Government does too much.
The Federal Government doesn’t do enough.

If pollsters don’t specify THE COUNTRY IS GOING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION BECAUSE . . ., then they are just testing optimism. They might as well ask if the glass is half empty or half full.

Personally, I’m a talking-head junkie, and my addiction flares up every four years. I spend far too much time watching the TV news, but even I could stand a slight reduction in the noise. Let’s retire the wrong direction question, so that the world can make at least a little bit more sense.

               *          *          *

On a tenuously related note, when all the talking heads were shocked by BREXIT, they were showing an appalling lack of imagination. Surely a nation which just this spring named an ecological research vessel Boaty McBoatface was capable of even bigger shocks

178. Leap Boy, back in the news

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Things sometimes change fast. I had this post ready a week ago, but BREXIT came along and I had to shuffle my schedule. I intended this as a revisit to a light entertainment from the end of February, and it still is. But BREXIT did more than change sequence; it also made this story – intended to be funny because it couldn’t happen – actually seem plausible.

You don’t remember? Leap Alan Hed, born on February 29, 1952, on Leap Day, the man who wouldn’t claim his age, the accidental President?

I guess I’ll have to tell you again.

Once upon a time – 1952, it was – a boy was born on Leap Day. His Dad was named Alan Hed, and he wanted to give his son the same name, but his wife had a quirky sense of humor. She told the nurse to call the boy Leap, as in Leap Alan Hed. When he was really young, his dad called him Alan and his mother called him Leap, but when he got old enough for school, his kindergarten teacher – who was a mean bastard, anyway  – called him Leap A. Hed. That brought about a sudden parent conference and after that the dad got his way, and the boy tried to forget that his first name was Leap.

People wouldn’t let him forget, and finally he gave in and refused to answer to a Alan any more. He went further. He decided that if he was going to be the boy with all those nicknames:

Leap Boy
Leap Frog
Leap for Cover
Leap Forward
Leap Back
. . . and of course, still, interminably, Leap Ahead . . .

If he was going to have to put up with all those stupid names, he was going to go all the way. I refused to celebrate his birthday on the twenty-eighth of February or the first of March. He only celebrated it on February twenty-ninth.

Worse, he counted his age by birthdays. When he was sixteen, he started putting his age down as four. He spent a lot of time talking to the principal about that, but they finally got tired of the whole business. You might say he out-stubborned them.

He couldn’t out-stubborn the draft board. When they said he was eighteen and he said he was four, they didn’t buy it. He claimed discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. He might have made it all the way to the Supreme Court, but when the 1969 draft lottery was held, February twenty-ninth drew number 285, so the draft board dropped the case.

After that his life calmed down. He never married (he claimed he was too young) and the IRS was indulgent. They figured he would regret his claims when he wasn’t eligible for Social Security until he was 260 years old.

Unfortunately for Leap – or Leap Boy, as the media started calling him – some joker heard about his claims and put him up for President in 2016. It caught fire. Saturday Night Live had a field day with the notion. Blogs sprang up all over the country in his name. The Leap Boy Theme Song (set to the tune of the old cowboy song Take Me Back to Texas, I’m Too Young to Marry) had eight million plays on U-tube.

Donald Trump denounced him. He said that if Leap claimed to be sixteen years old, that made him ineligible to be President.

Unfortunately some jokes get out of hand. On November eighth, after a massive write-in campaign by people who surely didn’t really expect to succeed, Leap Alan Hed was voted in as the forty-fifth president of the United States.

Oh, well. Could he be any worse?

I guess we’ll never know. At last report, he has fled to Canada, where he is seeking asylum under an assumed name.

When word got out, the Canadians didn’t want any part of the controversy. They refused to grant him asylum, and they refused to let him legally change his name.

It is said that anyone who wants to be President is automatically disqualified by reason of insanity. Maybe; if so Leap was the sanest man in America, because he really didn’t want it. He considered trying for asylum in another country. He thought about Switzerland, but he gets a nosebleed in an elevator. He thought about Russia, but the last thing he needed was to be caught up in that tug-of-war. He considered Great Britain, but he has been living in California and the thought of all that rain . . . (Late note: he didn’t think of BREXIT because that hadn’t happened when I wrote this.)

He decided to just disappear, and he did. I don’t know where he went; he didn’t tell me. Geraldo claimed to know, but that turned out to be a bluff. Somebody said they saw him heading north, following a compass, but everybody knows you can’t walk to the North Pole now that the ice caps have melted. Probably looking for a Fortress of Solitude, and you can’t blame him.

All those people who voted for Leap are now wringing their hands and wondering what is going to happen next. Every one of them thought they were the only one who would write him in. They never thought he would win. They never thought he would run to Canada like a modern day Draft Dodger. Which, essentially, is what he is — drafted to be President, and scared out of his wits.

Hillary has been very quiet about it all. She hopes to win in the House if they can find Leap, and if he resigns. But it’s problematical. There are only fourteen Democrats and eleven Republicans in the new Congress. Aside from a few Libs and Greenies, the rest are all newly elected Independents, sent by a disgusted America. Bernie is smiling.

Donald claims he will still win, and when he does, he plans to invade Canada.

177. Why Do I Do This?

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Why, indeed?

I am writing this on May 14th. I’ve been writing this blog for about a year now. The first post was August 31 of last year, but I hate deadlines, so I wrote these mini-essays for several months and stowed them away before I began posting them. Even now, a year later, I don’t feel comfortable if I have less than a month of posts in the queue.

Fear of failure? Not exactly; more like fear of writer’s block.

Earlier today I was writing posts 164 and 167 when I had a particularly lucid moment. Everything felt familiar and I realized that what I am doing now is an extension of my whole life.

I am still teaching.

I began this website because my novel Cyan was going to be published and I wanted to build a readership to support it. That explains why I started; it does not explain why after three hundred plus posts (counting Serial) I am not yet out of breath, nor out of ideas.

The world is a glorious and terrifying place. If you are alive in the world, it you are paying attention, especially if you read widely and think about what you’ve read, you will find that you have a lot to say. I’ve been been soaking it all in for 68 years and I want to share what i’ve learned.

That’s why I started writing in the first place. Then, after ten years, I had two books published by major publishers, with one translated into German, and I was starving to death. I had to get a day job. I fell into teaching and found that I hadn’t changed professions at all.

There are many kinds of teachers and that’s a good thing, because there are many kinds of students. I guarantee you, no matter how good you are at teaching, some of your students will hate you. And no matter how bad you are (within limits) some students will love you. Every student comes with his or her own unique set of needs.

For me, teaching was storytelling – but I have to clarify that. The teacher (we’ve all had them) who spends his days telling tales instead of teaching deserves to be fired.

The connection of teaching to storytelling is through the act of finding all the things the world has to offer, choosing those things that are within you purview, sorting and winnowing facts, discovering connections where they are not obvious, finding analogies that bring those connections to life, organizing your presentation to match the background and attention span of your audience, and paying attention to feedback.

In short, the teaching storyteller and the writer are two shades of the same hue.

So, after I began this website to support Cyan, I found that writing the blogs was a familiar and satisfying process. The world is a huge and fascinating place; I still want to tell everybody what I’ve learned by studying it.

Most of those who respond to A Writing Life are other bloggers. A larger audience beyond the blogosphere still eludes me. No matter. I don’t give up. And as for all those posts I write that countless millions do not read – I’m used to that. I taught middle school for 27 years, and you would be amazed at how much they don’t listen.

176. Fans, Conventions, and Writers

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The first books I read were science fiction. Okay, Tom Swift, Jr. is barely science fiction, but it’s what I cut my teeth on. The first book I checked out on my first trip to a library was science fiction. So were the next thousand. But I wasn’t a fan.

I watched Star Trek when it came on TV during the sixties. Some of the stories were really good. Most were dreck, compared to what I had been reading. If I had understood the financial and political constraints Roddenberry was under, I would have been more charitable. Still, I wasn’t a fan.

Actually, I was never a fan of anything – and that requires some explanation. I had enthusiasms, I had things I loved, I had things that fascinated me to the core of my being. But I never talked about them to anybody. When I occasionally mentioned the “Ecosystem Operable in Weightlessness” I was building for the regional science fair, eyes glazed over. So I didn’t mention it much.

Since you are reading this, I assume that your are at least something of a geek. In my tiny school, I was the only geek. That makes all the difference. And that’s why I was never a fan of anything. To be a fan means talking to other fans about your enthusiasms. I never had that opportunity.

I had plenty of friends, I enjoyed their company and they seemed to enjoy mine. We talked about what interested them, and that was fine. I did all the silly things that high school kids do, and had fun doing them. But I never shared the things that moved me, and when I left high school, I didn’t look back.

When I went to college – Michigan State – I went from a town of 121 people to a campus of 48,000. No one in all that whole crowd knew my name. I didn’t mind. I was used to keeping my inner life so quiet that it was almost secret, so anonymity was no problem.

When I became a writer, I had never met a writer. I wrote science fiction because that is what I knew and loved (the science as well as the fiction). When my first book came out, I was invited by my editor to a party at Charlie Brown’s house in the Oakland hills where he produced Locus at that time. In attendance were some editors, a couple of professional SF writers, and about twenty of us newbies. It was an interesting evening. The pros were working the room, chattering, happy as roosters in a field full of bugs. The editors were having quiet conferences here and there. Four of the newbies had staked out the four corners of the room to hide in and the rest were milling around looking for an empty corner. I felt right at home, in that I didn’t feel at home at all.

I went to Westercon 33 in Los Angeles, where Roger Zelazny was guest of honor. He was one of my three all time favorite writers, but I didn’t seek him out. I actually wouldn’t have spoken to him beyond a nod if we had shared an elevator. What could I say? “I love your work.” He must have heard that five hundred times that weekend.

I went to the World Fantasy Convention in Berkeley and to Westercon 34 in Sacramento, where I delivered a paper (How to Build a Culture). Somewhere along the way, I ended up talking to Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Marta Randall. Both were quite pleasant, but a ten minute conversation does not equal a friendship.

Most of the time I just wandered around those conventions, quietly enjoying the ambiance and the occasional sight of someone whose work I knew. In LA, I was cornered by a lovely young woman who chattered away at me for twenty minutes. She was a would-be actress, she said. She called herself “just another LA nobody”. She didn’t know I was a published writer; rather, she had picked me out to talk to because I looked alone and lonely. (Don’t look so surprised. I didn’t look so bad myself, back in 1980.)

Yes, I was alone, but I have never found that lonely.

Tomorrow begins Westercon 69 in Portland. I had planned to go again this year, but Cyan is still hung up in pre-publication, and I have too much pride to tell people, “My book is coming out any day now. They promised.”

Maybe I’ll see you in Tempe in 2017.

175. 1776, the movie

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Ah, June 29th. Its just about time to watch the movie 1776 again. It is a family tradition to watch it every year just before Independence Day.

My wife and I saw it first as a play on July 4, 1976, in an outdoor presentation. We had gone to the big city – locally that means San Francisco – to rub elbows with the crowds on the day of the Bicentennial. That afternoon, we were hooked. When it came out as a movie, we went to see it, then bought the VHS. Yes, this was before DVDs, or downloading, or streaming, or TiVo; actually, I think it was before we had bought a VCR, but we wanted to always have a copy.

1776 is a great patriotic rush of a movie but I wouldn’t recommend that you learn your history by watching it. The Columbia Companion to American History on Film says that “inaccuracies pervade 1776, though few are very troubling.” Maybe, but I’m not so sure. Some of the best parts of the movie just didn’t happen.

In fact, the wiki summary of historical accuracy praises the play while documenting error after error until you get the impression that nothing in it was true to life. See the movie first, then read the quibbles, because 1776 is not a historical movie, but an allegory, or better still, a retelling. It goes to the essence of the hesitation and worry, even fear, that attended the event, all wrapped in a story of arrogance, honest outrage, pride, and sacrifice. The writing is beautiful, the quips are side-splitting. Much of the dialog is taken from the words of people who were there, gleaned from works written by them years later.

In fact, there is no lack of historical material to work from in reconstructing the event, even though it was conducted in secrecy. These were literate men, with a clear picture of their own historical importance. Most of them told their own stories in later years.

Unfortunately, they tend to disagree on what actually happened. Years after I first saw the play, I went back to college for an MA in History, and thereafter set about trying to make my own knowledge of the event more accurate. It is surprisingly hard to do. Even the date July 4 is in partial doubt. The Declaration was approved on July 4. Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin claim that it was signed that day, but only a hand written copy then existed, and not all members were present. Those present may have signed the hand written copy – or not. We just don’t know. Certainly the printed version that we now view in the National Archives was not ready for some weeks. It was signed on August 2, but not by every member, as not all were present. Some signatures were apparently added piecemeal later on.

I care about historical accuracy, but when I am watching 1776, I let that go by and immerse myself in a moving theatrical experience. Now don’t bother me any further. I’ve got the DVD cued up.

174. Painfully United

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The UK has a painfully long name – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. How it came to be united is also painful; it is a millennium long story full of warfare, with some significant sore losers.

Since BREXIT, every knowledgable news commentator is predicting at least a partial breakup of Great Britain. A full understanding of why would take a book. I am going to put it into shorthand, with all the inaccuracies that entails. None of what follows is wrong, but it’s a kindergarten primer.

Once upon a time the British Isles (that includes Ireland) were Celtic. During the first millennium AD, Germanic invaders began to raid and colonize. These invaders were speakers of Germanic languages, including the languages ancestral to English. That doesn’t mean they were Germans, as we use the word today. Germany came to nationhood only very recently.

Over centuries, these Germanic speaking invaders came to conquer a good deal of what is now England, and were essentially the native population by 1000 AD. One group, the Angles gave us the name England.

Meanwhile, a  bunch of Vikings (Northmen, Normans) conquered the part of western France which came to be called Normandy. They shed their Scandinavian branch of the Germanic language family and took up French, along with wine, clothing that wasn’t fur, and other aspects of a better life style. in 1066, William the Bastard crossed the channel and conquered England, becoming William the Conqueror. He brought top-down feudalism, displaced the local lords, handed out fiefdoms to his followers, and introduced French as the language of the court. Middle English became the language of the commoners; it would take centuries for English to supplant French as the language of the intelligentsia.

The Robin Hood legends with poor Saxon serfs under the hated Norman lords comes from this period.

Wales fell under English domination through simple conquest in 1284. Full union with England took place in 1536, at which time Welsh law was suppressed.

In what would become Scotland, ancestral languages similar to Middle English had already overtaken the lowlands by the time the followers of William moved in. Beyond the highland line, as in Ireland and Wales, Celtic languages remained. Over the centuries, Scotland became a nation, with its own kings, traditions, and court culture. As it did so, the ancestral languages evolved into Scots. Scots is not English with a bad accent; it is a similar but separate language with its own literature, used in the Scottish court.

Scotland and England fought intermittently throughout the centuries. Since England was larger and more fertile, and could field larger armies for longer times, England won more often than it lost. Scotland became sometimes a vassal state and at other times, nearly so.

When Queen Elizabeth died childless, her cousin James the Sixth of Scotland was given the English throne. His proper title became James the Sixth and First, but the English ignored his Scottish heritage. So did he. He was ill used as a child in Scotland, and he couldn’t get to London fast enough. Although a Scottish King on an English throne, his home country was only a bad memory to him. 1603 was called the Union of the Crowns, but Scotland still had its own parliament.

For four generations spanning most of a century, the Scottish/English kings had their hands full fighting against English protestants who disliked their Catholic leanings. Back in Scotland, rabid Protestants had increased their power. Mid-century brought about the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, sometimes called the English Civil War, although it was also fought well beyond the English border. It was a complex situation, with the English vs. the Scots, Royalists vs. those who opposed the Divine Rights of Kings, and Catholics vs. Protestants. Individuals found themselves torn between conflicting loyalties, and the changing of sides was common. The planting of American colonies was heavily influenced by these events.

1707 saw the Act of Union. The Scottish Parliament was subsumed by the English one, after English manipulations had nearly bankrupted Scotland. The Scots language was suppressed. At one point, maps labeled Scotland as North Britain.

Events in Ireland were even more harsh, with multiple invasions from England, annexation, the plantation of Scottish protestants in Northern Ireland during the War of the Three Kingdoms, the genocidal Irish Famine, rebellion, partition, and the Troubles. Since 1921 Northern Ireland has been part of Great Britain while the bulk of the island became the separate Republic of Ireland. Ironically, this was done by vote, during which Northern Ireland stayed with Great Britain basically because the mass plantation of Scottish (now Scots-Irish) Protestants three hundred years earlier had shifted demographics.

If this sounds like England bashing, I apologize. It’s a complex situation, but winners tend to be hated by losers, and those feelings can last a long time. Just ask anyone who lives on the route of General Sherman’s march to the sea. England, AKA Great Britain, was the most powerful country on Earth for a third of a millennium. Such a country makes enemies. Unfortunately, some of them live in England’s back yard.

173. BREXIT is Science Fiction

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BREXIT is like science fiction at its finest. You take something that could have gone either way, preferably something unexpected, choose an outcome, and then predict what will come of it. You build your story around your prediction.

In real life, if you do something like that before an event, most people will laugh at your prediction. If you do it after the event, most people will say, “Aw heck, I saw that coming.”

As example of fictional “prediction”, here is a quote from Cyan:

The EuroFeds, smelling a chance to regain the hegemony that they had lost three centuries earlier, sent peace keeping forces to India, only to find dissension breaking out in their own countries as the world spanning financial complex, strained past the breaking point, could no longer deliver food to her people.

Hungry people aren’t kind. Starving people aren’t rational. There were attacks and reprisals, and then France nuked Italy, and the house of cards came tumbling down in an ever expanding nuclear nightmare.

Don’t worry, in the novel that doesn’t happen until 2145. Real world predictions, on the other hand, are looking pretty dicey on the heels of BREXIT.

War in Europe has seemed less and less likely since the middle of the last century, as agreements between European nations have proliferated. There has been a slow movement toward what some commentators called a “United States of Europe”. Many Europeans, including about 48 percent of British voters, saw this as the road to peace and prosperity. Others, including about 52 percent of British voters, saw it as a slow erosion of political freedom and the right to control their own culture.

I can see both sides of the argument. If I were a Brit, I’m not sure which way I would have voted. I am sure that there is a rocky road ahead.

In the long run, we may have seen the beginning of a slippery slope that ultimately unleashes the tensions now held in check by the European Union, leading to wars between member states. It’s too soon to tell, but that outcome wouldn’t be surprising.

The short run is easier to predict. Scotland came within a breath of separating from the rest of Great Britain only two years ago. It was the fear of economic disaster that tipped the scales. Now Britain has set in train that same disaster, while the Scottish section of the country voted overwhelmingly to remain a part of the EU. BREXIT has made Scotland’s near future breakaway almost a certainty.

Northern Ireland has its own set of issues, but being tethered to a dissolving British economy while the Republic of Ireland has EU resources to call upon, will certainly be an addition to Pan-Irish nationalism. Irish reunification, held off for a century by British military force, may yet become a reality.

Even Wales has its separatists. The United Kingdom is a mass of centrifugal forces, with a millennium of resentment among repressed peoples (see tomorrow’s post).

Here is a riddle. What is Great Britain if Scotland, and/or Northern Ireland, and/or Wales leave? Answer: England. Not the same country at all as Great Britain.

Here is a more grim riddle. If Great Britain implodes, who will take its place on the UN Security Council, and wield its veto. England? Scotland, perhaps? And what will Russia and China have to say about the matter?

If it seems that such events can’t happen, I would remind you that the newly united American colonies almost fell apart in the decade between the Declaration of Independence and the coming of the Constitution. And then there was that pesky little bloodbath called the Civil War.

The exit contagion seems to be spreading. France is talking exit; so is Spain. Spain, in particular, should be careful what it asks for. There are massively disruptive forces in that country, with Basque separatists in the north west and a long standing call for a separate Catalan speaking country in the south east.

So now is the time for all would-be science fiction writers to set down the timelines for their own alternate futures. There must be at least a thousand possibilities.

Is anyone taking bets?

172. Flash Fiction Day

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Today we have a short post on a short subject.

This Saturday, June 25, is Flash Fiction Day in Great Britain. The nice thing about the internet, is that even Americans can click on a British site, so you can check them out.

The term flash fiction is relatively new to me. I discovered it about a year ago while I was writing the blog entry A Very Short Story over on Serial. That entry has since been moved to Backfile.

The story in question was Koan; at 175 words, it would not be eligible for Saturday’s 100 word contest, but it’s short enough not to take itself too seriously, which seems to be important in flash fiction.

I remember, many years ago, one of the science fiction magazines ran a series of vignettes (think of vignette as an old word for flash fiction), then ran a contest for “The Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told.” The subject of the contest was, “The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door . . .”

Most of the entries were forgettable, but one stuck in my mind for its cleverness, brevity, and sheer laziness – yes, what else would you call adding only seven words. The entire story read:

The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door. It was the last woman on Earth.

Snicker!

I have to warn you about the British website. There isn’t any science fiction there. It’s all fuzzy and warm and about feelings and relationships. Very academic, very much “literature”, pretty much what you would expect from a site which announces Supported using public funding by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND on its masthead.

If you want another kind of flash fiction, just Google. There are all kinds. For example, National Flash Fiction Day in New Zealand is on June 22, because it’s the shortest day in the year – in the southern hemisphere. I like that.

So, how shall I end this bit? Of course — A flash essay about flash fiction. Eighteen words ought to do it.

Steak is good. Vegetables are good. A balanced diet is admirable. But there’s nothing wrong with potato chips.