All articles filed in Fiction Friday

A bit of fantasy for your Wednesday morning, inspired by this picture (no really, click it open)…. * The moment Clarissa saw the forest, she knew. She knew it in the shadowy hush that clung to the spired evergreens; she knew it by the tingling that crept down her spine. The world she’d always sensed,…

Those two words are Write At the Merge’s prompt for this week. For a change I knew exactly where I wanted to take this one: back to Carlo & Alison. * Alison and her husband sat in the basement, sorting the overflow of three decades. They worked quietly. The weight of a thousand unspoken hurts…

Carlo was waiting at the ninth hole with his business partner and his parish priest when a boy came out from the clubhouse with a slip of paper. “Allison?” asked James, seeing his expression, while Father O’Keefe circled his ball, trying to puzzle a clean shot out of the worst setup the longtime trio had…

Just before dawn, Matthew wakes abruptly from a nightmare. Shivering, he looks at the boy huddled beside him for fleeting warmth. His son’s hair is matted with sweat. The fever’s broken, then. Matthew breathes a thank you; of all the things they lost After, medicine is what he misses most. He abandons the paltry warmth…

This is an excerpt from the novel I’ve been querying…slightly condensed to fit the word count. Dean is falling in love with Beth and her young son Toby, and for their first “date,” they’ve gone to an apple orchard. As always, concrit is most welcome. * She looked so cute in her baggy t-shirt, with crinkled…

“Hey, Jenny!” My little brother’s voice pokes through my hazy brain as I try to figure out what  propensity and vouch mean, and what in the world they have to do with a headless horseman. I pull off an ear bud. “What?” Caleb quivers with excitement. “Guess what, Jenny? Daddy is Superman!” “What?” I want…

“It must have something to do with the Aztecs,” said Matt. I glanced over at Jude, who was staring at the words on his laptop screen with the heel of his hand jammed into his temple. He was biting his lip to keep from laughing. “You mean the Mayans, numbskull.” Tina stuck a post-it note…

This week, Write On Edge asked us to explore locale–local flavor  that adds realism to fiction. Today I’m borrowing from my completed, but so far unloved novel, In An Instant. Beth is a single mother and aspiring concert pianist who’s returned to her Iowa hometown to raise her son. She gets involved with someone she had…