Story Sale

I received some good news last week from the editors at Liquid Imagination: they're going to publish "Grandpa's Bluetooth" in their next issue. This was my Write1Sub1 story for week #6, and I'm glad to see it find a good home after just one rejection. Here's how it opens:

They take me to Seven Oaks Nursing Home because I’m the only one he’ll talk to. They say he’s got dementia and it’s not the same as being senile, that he’s a stubborn old fart and probably faking the whole thing. I don’t know about that. Maybe he just doesn’t want to talk to them.

"Grandpa's Bluetooth" is one of a handful of stories this year that started out originally as Twitter-fiction but grew into something much more. (The 140-character version of this story will appear @ Trapeze later this year.) Have any of your micro-tales ever evolved beyond their constraints like Dr. Banner into the Incredible Hulk?

Speaking of microfiction, a couple of my first attempts at 6-word stories appeared @ Cuento this past week: "Swan Dive into the Deep" and "Honored Dead".

Have you heard of the "American Sentence" poetry form? Yeah, me neither—until recently. It shares the same syllable count as traditional haiku (5 – 7 – 5), but instead of being three distinct phrases, it reads like a sentences (and hence the name). Here are a couple of mine:

Children scoop up memories by the bucketful and hope nothing spills.

If only we could spread the warmth of a coffee shop beyond these walls.

I submitted both to Seven by Twenty, but the editor passed. She did, however, accept two haiku, and they'll appear online in May.

>  W1S1 update: 16 short stories written in 16 weeks + some microfiction and poetry.