At the start of September, the company switched over to full-time in the office. This effectively doubled the amount of time I spend on the road. Of course, this added to my fatigue and to time that I could not spend writing. And I was starting to think that 30Day50k would be an impossible dream.

The Lizzie Borden House Anthology [Girón, Sèphera, Graham, Heather, Addison, Linda, van Belkom, Edo, Wilson, Trish, Grant, Shannon, Wytovich, Stphanie M.] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying ...

The English alphabet has, of course, 26 letters. But let's nix X for the moment. Er, sorry, not sorry, Elon Musk. Find four words for each of the remaining 25 letters. But not just any four words. Oh, no. I want you to find four words which have multiple meanings. The weirder and more out-there the different meanings are, the better.

ALT: Grateful for the Writing Community

We show you colors. You recreate them from memory. Challenge friends to beat your score. It's harder than you think. Play free at dialed.gg.

Right now, I just plain do not feel like putting myself out there these days. And good lord, all the adulting I have had to do recently is just plain exhausting.

Debris rained all around her. Shoes. A teapot. A crate for an animal that she hoped was empty. A small piece of luggage in an ultra-feminine shade of pink nearly hit her on the head. “That’s, that’s a train case,” she mumbled. Why did I remember that, of all things?

Amidst the K-cups, the stirrers, the paper plates, and the plastic utensils, we wait. We unplugged the coffee maker and added it to the mess in front of the door. It is two round tables on their sides and six chairs and, absurdly, the coffee maker. It’s as good a break room barricade as anyone has ever made, I figure. I’m the new girl. I’m just a file clerk. This is my summer job. I was just supposed to make some cash and sock it away for Boston College next year, but instead it’s me and my coworker, hunkered down in the break room, waiting it out.

…it is entirely possible that these days we would consider her potentially to be a danger to herself and others. After all, throughout the entire story, she never wavers from her own firm beliefs. Nothing will crush or change her inner narrative or her overall world view. Never mind that she cannot tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Perhaps she never could.

I guess I should have seen signs even earlier. She was the one who said there were movies playing on the glass of our dad’s computer imaging scanner. She was the one who made a weird green and blue glass cover for the ceiling fixture in our room and then, a year later, said she was afraid of all the weird green and blue things and people which were only in our room. Well, duh.

Finding the Lost Luggage of Time The Lost Luggage of Time has a truly strange vibe to it, but it is also easily one of the better stories I wrote at, heh, the time. I wrote this story during the fourth quarter of 2016. And then I mainly forgot about it. So, it was more or less lost for about a decade.

It is Time to Look at The Playback So, one thing about The Playback is it is the kind of story I rarely write any more. While I love lyrics and they can often inspire, this one seems a little too on the nose. I wrote this story during the third quarter of 2017. It was originally for a third…

It is Time to Unveil The Bride While I have written about some weddings before, I do not think I have concentrated quite so closely on the bride until this short story. Also, this story is a part of the Real Hub universe. I wrote this story during the third quarter of 2018. Background As I was writing The Real Hub of the Universe…

Alt: A black and white gif of actor Harpo Marx shoveling a pile of books into a fire. From one of the Marx Brothers movies (maybe Duck Soup?).

If beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, then what happens if that eye just so happens to belong to a sapient non-human species? With a lot of the usual weirdness that goes on in beauty pageants, there’s only one small problem in the contest to crown a new Miss Milky Way. It’s really tiny. I probably shouldn’t even bother mentioning it. What is it? The losers will…

Alt: Actor John Krasinski, in a black jacket, says "Pahked it," while walking away from a car. Gif is from an ad for Smart Park, which parodies the typical Boston accent as Boston-centric celebrities (also Rachel Dratch and David Ortiz) exaggerate Boston accents while touting the product.

Progress Report – First Quarter 2026 How was first quarter 2026 for writing? So, I spent first quarter 2026 mainly working on completing the November 2025 novel, The Invisible Gang. I did a ton of writing while juggling, well, the rest of my life. And then in mid-February, my father passed away. This colored a lot of what I was writing, and naturally took up a ton of my time.

The first paragraph contains one of my favorite phrases to write. And yes, I have used it before. But it still works. "... when they came." It is obvious there has been some sort of a disaster. And we humans types are not doing so well. No. Not at all. But there is an opportunity out there. We just need to figure out how to seize it.

Alt: A small white chihuahua dog is looking at the camera with a serious look on its face which turns to a sinister grin.

2026 marks the 16th consecutive year of this groundbreaking research on the online community management industry.

Violence is un-American. Funding it is unacceptable.

Celebrate the launch of Mass Innovation Nights at the Museum of Science as ten local startups debut their latest breakthroughs in a high-energy showcase of Massachusetts creativity and community-drive...

Alt: Actor Peter Sellers in a suit is standing in a room with a globe and a music stand saying, "We must find that woman." Probably from the first Pink Panther film, A Shot in the Dark.

One easy way you can trust your readers is to not spoon feed them every single little bit. You don’t have to provide explanations for everything. For example, there are some foreign words and phrases that most Americans (assuming your readers are Americans) just know. Which words and phrases? These are phrases and words like bonjour, aloha, shalom, déjà vu, mañana, pasta e fagioli, omega, fjord, and carpe diem. Most importantly, these are words that you really do not need to translate for your readers. But words like shemesh, limpia para brisa, or folgen? You’d better translate them. By the way, in order, that’s Hebrew for sun, Spanish for windshield wiper, and German for follow.

Looks like Lizzie Borden is Vital to the Timeline is published by Riverdale Avenue Books!

Samantha is buried under rubble somewhere in Arizona, thinking that there’s been some sort of an earthquake. As her calls for help turn to whispers amidst the dust and debris, she hears a bark and sees a person in full protective gear come to save her. While things should have been looking up for her, the rescuer lets her in on what happened.

I think the idea of a haunted radio station is pretty nifty. And one of these days, maybe I will have the time and the ideas and wherewithal to expand this one into the kind of story it always should have been.

For this short story about a breakout from an alien prison, I harkened back to some old World War II prison break films. And, I got to thinking about the mechanics of it. Consider this: unlike in the Second World War, there’s no one who is sympathetic, willing to hide you. There’s no way for you to truly blend in with the rest of the populace, even if you speak their language fluently. And it would be hard to appeal to someone’s sense of kinship or decency. After all, at this stage in human development, what sort of kinship could we possibly ever have with an alien race?

Sibling rivalry shows up a lot in my fiction, in particular my shorter fiction. But in this short story, that fact of life for so many of us takes a deadly center stage.