Tag: Fiction

A surreal, comedic dialogue with Chase Griffin on improv, tone synesthesia, pratfalls, flamingos, grief, comedy as spell work, and finishing the unfinishable novel.

I started thinking about how I spend so much of my days treating my art like a product and my personality as a brand. The thought that my small ideas would someday become commitments never occured to me when I was younger.

Sometimes a class exercise changes lives and here I credit Hemingway’s creation of the Six Word Story. His World’s Saddest Story (For sale: baby shoes, never worn) reputedly won him a bar bet and has spawned dozens of websites devoted to flash fiction.

It’s easy to start a press, but it’s much harder to keep one going. For Joshua Bohnsack, running Long Day Press has been wonderful, stressful, frustrating and heartbreaking, and rewarding, all at once.

We’re inviting submissions of short works—fiction or non-fiction, poetry, prose, or other experimental forms—that explore all the many contradictory faces of paradox.

“The Second” was written for a speculative fiction writing workshop and very last-minute in its original form. I did the plotting and world-building on the fly, and basically the original idea was “what if the protagonist were trying to save their friend from a duel?”

Whether I chose to feel my emotions fully, or experience the depth of them — that wasn’t up to me. That was up to God, or Satan, or whatever it was that controlled me.