Fiction Attic Press

Category: On Writing

  • The Man of the House Comes Home

    flash fiction by Elle Enderlin

    The coffee is brewed, the dishes done, the house silent, and you are in the zone. Finally, the words are flowing. It’s a story you’ve been meaning to write forever, but somehow you never do. Maybe it will get written today.

    And then you hear a door closing—not slamming, just closing with a kind of blunt finality, announcing “I am home.” Footsteps pound through the kitchen and into the living room, where you have set up shop on the couch: laptop, coffee, notebook, pen, a blanket over your knees to cut the chill.

    The man of the house has come home, and he is on the phone. He sits down in the chair across from you. He is talking in his outside voice. He is making deals, setting meetings, participating in the work of the world.

    You pick up your laptop, your coffee cup, your pen, your notebook, and carry everything down the hall to the bedroom. You close the door and set up your makeshift office in bed. You try to return to the zone. It’s not easy, reentering the fictional dream after the dream is broken, so you write the first thing that comes to you, a title: “The Man of the House Comes Home.”

    You begin this story, which is about him but not about him, which is about love and interruption, but mostly interruption. You love him, this man who comes home most days at seven in the evening but today at noon, en route to a different meeting. He is a kind man, a wise man, a man who, like so many men you have known, and possibly every man you have slept with, still quotes Apocalypse Now on occasion. It is the ultimate man’s movie, these men who have some inkling of the beast within them, but who are by no means beastly. These men who imagine the great escape. These men who are expected to behave heroically (and sometimes do) but who secretly long to be anti-hero instead, loved and lauded for all the wrong reasons.

    You love him of course, that is not the issue. But sometimes the space he takes up is bigger than the space you have.

    And then he is walking down the hallway, calling your name, and then he is opening the door to the bedroom, a second zone breached, the story ending before it began. 

    “Hey,” he says. “I hope I wasn’t too loud.”

    He wants your intellectual opinion on a matter of some importance. You can say that about him: he is always seeking your opinion. He wants to bounce ideas off of you. He wants to know if you agree with his approach for the meeting he is heading off to, or if you would do it differently.

    “Okay but I’m writing,” you say.

    “Literature?” he asks, wryly but not unkindly, because it has been so long since you have written fiction, beset as you are by the labors of the home: which is not to say that you cook well or clean well or even take on the majority of the domestic duties, only that you have a teenager, which makes you feel exhausted, incompetent, physically necessary yet existentially unneeded. 

    “Not exactly,” you say.

    His curiosity is piqued. He always wants to know what you are writing. He is, after all, your biggest fan, will always set aside what he is doing to talk about what you are writing, to read it, to praise it, to offer suggestions, most of which are excellent.

    “What are you writing then?” he asks, the meeting of great importance momentarily forgotten.

    “It’s called ‘The Man of the House Comes Home,’” you say.

    He smiles. “I like it.” He turns to leave. “I’m sorry. You were working, it can wait.”

    You close your laptop, slide it off of your lap, turn your focus on him. He is wearing good jeans and a button-down, the uniform of the mature modern male professional in the unwild west. You are wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt he bought you on one of his trips, bearing the name of a city you’ve never been to, in a country known for its bright blue waters and occasional terroristic bombings. The latest bombing happened in the very hotel he had stayed in, just days after he checked out. You live with the uncomfortable knowledge that his job is not quite safe, that one of his trips might well end in disaster. This may be, after all, why you tolerate his interruptions: you secretly fear any one of them could be the last.

    “It’s okay. What were you saying?”

    He comes to sit on the edge of the bed. A conversation will ensue. This is what you do together. This is marriage. You hate being interrupted, but if you must be interrupted you’re glad that he is the one to do it. And without these interruptions, what would get written anyway? You don’t really like to leave the house. You are not good at getting out there. He gets out there and participates vividly in the world and brings home this energy, these ideas. You will have the conversation and then you will write the story, cannibalizing the life he lives out there for the things you write in here, inside this domestic sphere, on the couch or on the bed or sometimes in the kitchen, where you sometimes stand—not to cook but to write, when your back is tired from sitting, when you are waiting for more coffee to brew.

    The man of the house is home. In a few minutes he will leave, and you will take up where you left off.

    Elle Enderlin lives and writes in bed in the Pacific Northwest.

  • Writing Truth Number One

    Writing Truth Number 1:

    The writing life is a long and meandering path.

    Here’s the good news: we’re not models. We don’t have a shelf life. We don’t have to do our best work by the age of twenty, and, in fact, for most of us, our best work will come much later than that. Are you 40 and you haven’t yet published a book? 50? 65? No worries.

    The path is long because it can be. As long as you are lucid, you can write, and you’ll probably get better as you go.

    The path is meandering because you will change, and the publishing world will change, and the things you want to write about will likely change as well.
    The path is meandering because you will change, and the publishing world will change, and the things you want to write about will likely change as well. When I began writing, I saw myself as a writer of short stories. I only started writing a novel after hearing from many agents, in numerous rejection letters, to get back to them when I had a novel. The way you write will probably change, too. When I was first starting out, I wrote a lot of very long, beautiful sentences, because that’s what I thought writing was about. With each book, however, the sentences get more pared down. I’ve learned to see the beauty in brevity, the startling power of sparse language.

    As it turned out, after writing my first novel, I was hooked. So I wrote another one. And another one. And another one after that. And now, I’ve just turned in a revision of yet another one. A couple of my novels sold really well. A couple didn’t sell well at all. There was a period of two years when I published two books in a row, followed by a period of six years when I didn’t publish a book at all, followed by a year in which I published two books in one month. By which I mean to say that the path changes. Sometimes it’s smooth, sometimes it’s bumpy, sometimes you feel lost in the undergrowth, sometimes the vista looks expansive and promising.

    What matters is that you keep going.
    What matters is that you keep going. Simply that. Don’t stop writing. Well, actually, maybe you’ll stop writing for a few weeks or a few months, because you had a baby or you started a new job or someone in your family needs a caregiver or you’re moving to a new house/new city/new relationship. That’s okay. Really—it is—as long as you start back up again.

    And that is the first thing I wish I’d known about writing twenty years ago: the path is long and meandering. It’s okay to have days when you don’t write, and it’s okay to have years when you don’t publish, and it’s okay to have books that don’t sell well. Because there will also be days when you do write, and years when you do publish, and, if you’re lucky and extremely persistent, there will even be books that sell well.

    Your job is simply to write. Get on the path. Stay on it, no matter where it takes you.

  • Narrative Craft: Point of View

    There are two things to consider when choosing the point of view of your novel.

    1. Who is telling the story?
    2. From what distance is the story being told?

    There are four primary points of view you might choose for your novel:

    • First person
    • Limited third person
    • Omniscient
    • Second person

    Whatever point of view you choose, one of the biggest mistakes you can make is suddenly shift point of view, thereby interrupting the fictional dream. This is particularly true with first person narration. If your novel is told from the point of view of a particular character, you must be careful not to break character by suddenly revealing something that your point of view character wouldn’t logically know. The moment you slip into someone else’s mind, the gig is up. The reader is left wondering, “What just happened?”

     

    First Person

    An “I” speaks to the reader. The character’s voice becomes extremely important. The language of your story must be consistent with the language and tone of a particular character.

     

    Advantage of First Person:

    It’s very intimate, resulting in less distance between the speaker and the reader.

    It allows the author to delve deeply into the mind of a single character

     

    Disadvantages of First Person:

    The narrator (and therefore the reader) does not have access to what is going on inside the minds of the other characters. The narrator can know only what this particular character knows.

    In Nabokov’s Lolita, the story is narrated in the first person by Humbert Humbert; as the story unfolds through his perspective, we begin to understand that Humbert is an unreliable narrator—that is, we cannot trust his version of the story. Either by intent or by some flaw of his nature, he fails to tell us the truth. In the case of Lolita, it makes for an interesting and complex story.

    Mersault engages the reader’s empathy in The Stranger, despite his seeming coldness, because the first-person narration brings the reader straight into Mersault’s mind. We understand his motivations from his own point of view, and, as a result, actions that might otherwise seem reprehensible begin to make sense to us.

     

    First person peripheral refers to a first-person narrator who is not at the center of the story, but who is commenting instead on what s/he observes about other characters.

     

    Third Person Limited

    This perspective is quite close to first person, so close, in fact, that if it is done well the reader may forget that no “I” is present. Although the narrator speaks in third person (he/she/it), the narrator stays close to the mind of a single character.

     

    Advantages & Disadvantages

    This perspective has pretty much the same advantages and disadvantages of the first person narrator. It does, however, establish a bit more distance between reader and narrator than does the first person.

     

    Omniscient

    An omniscient narrator sees all, hears all, and knows all. There’s really nothing an omniscient narrator doesn’t have access to. This type of narrator can delve into the minds of all of the characters. An omniscient narrator also knows background, and can even comment on what will happen in the future.

    An omniscient narrator sees all, hears all, and knows all. There’s really nothing an omniscient narrator doesn’t have access to. This type of narrator can delve into the minds of all of the characters. An omniscient narrator also knows background, and can even comment on what will happen in the future.

    Examples of omniscient narration include the novels of Charles Dickens, the stories of Tolstoy and Chekhov, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

     

    Advantages

    It allows the writer to paint with a broad brush stroke.

     

    Disadvantages

    It establishes greater distance between the reader and the characters, so some of the emotional resonance may be either lost or more difficult to achieve.

    You must be adept at moving back and forth among the different characters, while making it clear to whom a particular section, paragraph, thought, or event is occurring.

     

    When to Use Omniscient Narration

    If your novel has a large cast of characters and you want to be able to show their actions, thoughts, and conversations, the omniscient point of view is your best bet. It’s also good for intergenerational novels.

     

    Second Person

    While the second person isn’t terribly common, it bears mentioning.

    The “you” to whom the narrator is speaking may be the reader as listener, the narrator’s alter ego (in which “you” refers to the narrator himself, as in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City), or a particular third party (as in Jamaica Kincaid’s story “Girl,” where the “you” is the narrator’s daughter).

    Disadvantages:

    The second person lends itself more to short fiction than to novels. In long form fiction, second person can sound tiresome or even off-putting, and can feel very claustrophobic. It’s also difficult to maintain over a span of hundreds of pages. I recommend using second person only if you feel that it is the only way in which your particular story can be told.

     

     

    What Point of View Are You Most Comfortable With?

    Look back at the fragments you have written. Is there one point of view that runs through all or most of them?

    What point of view came most naturally to you as you were writing? Why? This is often the point of view from which the story wants to be told. Think of the novels you enjoy. Are most of them limited third person, first person, omniscient? The kind of novel you are drawn to will offer clues for the kind of novel you want to write.

  • Narrative Craft: Setting

    Setting encompasses not only place, but also time.

    Where does your story take place?

    When does your story happen?

    To truly understand the depth of feeling that setting lends to a novel, read those writers whose names have become associated with a particular place. The following writers are such masters at setting that reading their books may be the best education you can get in how to write convincingly about place and time:

    • Eudora Welty is Mississippi and the Deep South.
    • Ron Rash writes so convincingly and heartbreakingly of Appalachia that his novels and stories have become one with the place. When one thinks of Appalachian literature, one thinks of Ron Rash.
    • Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina, a memoir of desolate poverty and abuse, forever linked her to Greenville, South Carolina.
    • By the time I moved to San Francisco in the late nineties, I felt I knew the place by heart, thanks in part to Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
    • Paul Auster, who has published dozens of books, will forever be remembered for some of his earliest novels, The New York Trilogy.

    While Ian McEwan writes primarily about England, his chilling novella The Comfort of Strangers derives much of its tension from the setting of Venice—the convoluted streets and hidden alleys are essential to the feeling of disorientation that leads to the protagonist’s undoing.

    Nordic writers seem to have a particular gift for creating settings so stark and extreme that the setting itself becomes a major player in the novel. If you want to know how to do setting, read Icelandic crime writer Arnaldur Indridason (Arctic Chill) and prolific Swedish husband and wife team Sjöwall-Wahlöö (The Man on the Balcony, The Laughing Policeman).

    On the more literary end of the spectrum, Pers Peterson’s Out Stealing Horses, named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2007, is set in the sometimes bleak, sometimes breathtakingly beautiful Norwegian countryside.

    By the way, Peterson has said, “I do not plan” (sound familiar?) He compares making art to “carving out a sculpture from some material. You have to go with the quality of the material and not force upon it a form that it will not yield to anyway. That will only look awkward.”

    For me, setting comes first. I know the setting before I know anything else about the story. Think about the last great book you read. Chances are, you had a strong idea of where you were early in the book.

    A novel or story that opens with dialogue often leaves the reader scratching his head. Why? Because dialogue without a clear picture of who is speaking, or a sense of the speaker’s place, is disorienting. Setting grounds a story. When readers enter a book through a strong setting, they have a more complete sensory experience. Our senses drag us into the narrative. When you begin with setting—the dark alleys of Venice at night, the stark, frozen landscape of Norway—the readers’ senses and emotions are instantly engaged.

     

    Remote as Mars

    When writing setting, it helps to make the assumption that your audience has never been there. Think of your setting as a place as remote as Mars: you are describing this utterly foreign landscape to someone who has no idea of what the place is, what it looks like, smells like, what the air tastes like.

    Speaking of Mars, I highly recommend Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles for further study on setting. Bradbury puts his character on Mars, and describes the place with such utter attention to realistic detail that we feel not only as though we are there, but as though being there, on Mars, isn’t really that strange at all.

     

    Now, think of one of your strongest memories, from any place or time. Write about the setting where this memory takes place.

    Write about the setting where this memory takes place.

  • Writers on Writing: Stephen King on Grammar & Work

    Stephen King recently sat down with Jessica Lahey of The Atlantic Monthly to talk about teaching writing. King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft is one of my favorite books on writing ever written. I love it for its accessibility, its wisdom, its lucidity, and its utter lack of pretension.

    Lahey gained a new respect for the book when she used it to unlock her students’ resistance  while teaching writing in a residential drug and rehab program for teens.

    At one point, Lahey asks King about the relevance of teaching grammar in classrooms. “Why bother to name the parts?” she asks, if someone “either absorbs the principles of one’s native language in conversation and in reading or one does not.” Here is King’s response:

    When we name the parts, we take away the mystery and turn writing into a problem that can be solved. I used to tell them that if you could put together a model car or assemble a piece of furniture from directions, you could write a sentence. Reading is the key, though. A kid who grows up hearing “It don’t matter to me” can only learn doesn’t if he/she reads it over and over again.

    I like the idea of demystifying writing, of naming the parts in order to make them less lofty and unattainable. The key here, though, is that we learn what we hear, and if we hear the wrong thing from an early age, we will have to retrain ourselves.

    Read the entire interview, How Stephen King Teaches Writing.

    Or get the book.

  • Revision: first draft vs. final draft

    No one writes a perfect story, essay, or novel the first time around. That’s where revision comes in. The first draft contains everything you wanted to say. The final draft contains everything you needed to say—those things that are essential to the story.

    The first draft is likely to have more abstractions, while the final draft should be brimming with significant detail.

    The final draft should not contain every detail you find interesting or clever, every detail that came to you during your many inspired and challenging hours of writing. It should, instead, contain relevant details that add meaning. Purple flowered couch may be less meaningful, for example, than the broken pot beneath the window. The purple couch is merely a matter of taste, whereas the broken pot indicates that something has happened—a break-in, maybe, or a more general state of disrepair in the lives of the characters.

    The final draft may be longer or shorter than the first draft, depending on your inclinations, but it should be more focused.

    I usually edit out many thousands of words over the course of my revisions, but some writers create a skeletal first draft and flesh it out later. I tend to write an overblown first draft and pare it down over time. Whether you pare down or expand upon your first draft, in the end, your final draft should be more focused. The associations among the various parts of your narrative will be clearer, and the themes will have been strengthened by the actions and observations of the characters.

    The first draft is your baby, the thing you can’t let go of. The final draft is your concession that a book must be interesting, it must be cognizant of an audience, and it must make the reader want to keep turning pages.

    By “concession” I do not mean that you have sold your literary soul, only that you have found a way to combine your best vision and your hard-won narrative skills, in order to make a thing of beauty that is both meaningful and entertaining.

    Michelle Richmond is the author of four novels and two story collections. Get her weekly writing and publishing tips, or sign up for an online writing class.

  • Writers on Writing – Willa Cather on “Making It an Adventure”

    In 1921, Willa Cather told an editor for the magazine Bookman that she only worked for two and a half to three hours each day. “If I made a chore of it, my enthusiasm would die,” she said. “I make it an adventure every day.”

    Like so many other writers, Cather preferred working in the morning when she was “fresh” and unencumbered by the day’s concerns. I always prefer working in the morning, too, although my intentions are far better than my practice. For me, the key is getting up early enough to give myself at least an hour before I switch to “mom” mode, which means getting up not a minute later than 5:00. I go to bed most nights believing I will be out of bed by 5:00 the next morning, and then I roll out of bed closer to 6:30 or 7:00, chastising myself and promising to do better tomorrow.

    Today was one of those rare days when I happened to live up to my nightly vow. By 5:05 I was at my desk with my coffee, writing. By 6:30, I had written three and a half pages. Those three and a half pages felt more like 20; I felt triumphant, as if I had accomplished a great deal.

    And it only took one and a half hours! Cather is on to something here. If you work in short spurts–two hours instead of five–every minute of it is more likely to feel like an adventure. If you can’t afford two hours, try one. If you can’t afford an hour, try thirty minutes. University of Nebraska Press has published a whole book of Cather’s insightful advice on writing, with the utterly unpretentious and spot-on title, Willa Cather on Writing.

    Alice Munro, by the way, is a writer who accomplished much of her early success while juggling writing with motherhood. First, she wrote while her youngest child napped, and later, she wrote while her children were at school. Toni Morrison’s time was so limited as a single mother with a nine-to-five job that the time she did manage to find at the typewriter was rich with possibility. “By the time I get to the paper something’s there,” she said. “I can produce.”

    No matter when you are able to make it to your writing desk, or your notebook, try to approach it as an adventure, not a chore. Merely having the privilege of an hour to write can be an adventure in itself.

    This week, when you sit down to write, attempt to do it with a sense of enthusiasm for the hour that you have, the hour that will never repeat itself, this spectacular, beautiful, unique hour in which anything can happen.

  • How to End a Story

    Stories are like relationships: the beginning is always so much fun, and the ending is fraught with turmoil.

    When I sit down to start a story, the first sentence just sort of comes to me. The second sentence too. If I’m lucky, the third swiftly follows. The inimitable short story writer Kate Braverman once visited a class I was teaching and told the graduate students that she channels her characters. They speak through her and onto the page, she said, as if she isn’t even there.

    I, unfortunately, channel nothing. It is all rough work after sentence three. By the time I’m in the middle of the story, I’m feeling more than a little uncomfortable. Where am I going? Where have I been? Have I gotten lost in the labyrinth? Probably, yes.

    Somehow, I find my way through. The characters do things. They meet with hardship and grief, or maybe they just meet someone challenging in a Laundromat. They get into trouble, maybe out of it. Probably not. I find myself feeling that they have done all they can do. Not much more can be said. The action has fallen. We have all had our dénouement (which, by the way, is a French term meaning untying, from Middle French desnouement, from desnouer – to untie – from Old French desnoer, from des- de- + noer meaning to tie, from Latin nodare, from nodus knot.) And here we are in the labyrinth again, attempting to untie the knot, unwind the rope, escape the not-so-fun funhouse.

    It’s time to write our way out.

    One wants to resolve things, after all.One feels a deeply human need to conclude. After the falling action, there is often something more. Something unexpected. And here we come to what I have been meaning to say all along: a good ending is layered. The reader thinks she has discovered everything she can possibly discover about a story, but then: another image appears, another paragraph hums along, another question begs to be answered. One is left with the feeling of having walked out of the dark theater into the light, only to realize there was something else playing after the credits, some secret part of the film, some final moment. You can hear it through the door, vaguely, but you can’t get back in. You’re not sure what you’ve missed, but you’re certain that you’ve missed something, that the reel kept on playing, the story kept on going, after your departure. You were only an observer, a brief malingerer, there but not there. The lives within the story carry on.

    Online Writing Classes with The Book Doctor

  • The Art of Simplicity – tips for writers from graphic designer Chip Kidd

    I’ve been reading Chip Kidd’s Go: A Kidd’s Guide to Graphic Design. Although the book was written for a younger audience, it’s a gorgeous, superbly readable crash course in the history and principles of graphic design.

    One of the lessons that writers can take to heart is Kidd’s explanation of simplicity vs. complexity. “Simple, direct visual elements will get the attention of your viewer in a different way than complex images that the writer will have to decode,” Kidd writes. Complexity, on the other hand, “has to be very carefully managed or it becomes chaos.”

    The best writing strikes a balance between simplicity and complexity. As a writer and as a reader, I am drawn to very direct sentences that are simple to navigate. I’m not talking about sentences that are very short, or sentences in which vocabulary is limited to the lowest common denominator. I’m talking about sentences that are clear and meaningful. The writer’s goal, on a sentence by sentence level, should be clarity. Overblown descriptions, adjective pile-ups, and self-conscious phrasing hinder clarity. Any sentence that screams “look at me!” fails the reader. The writer’s job is to communicate a story. The sentences should be clean enough to communicate that story effectively.


    For me, complexity comes into the picture in the construction of the plot and the pattern of the novel. Kidd uses a wonderful spirograph illustration to demonstrate the principle of complexity. When you write a novel, there are many elements at play, including character, theme, plot, setting, and point of view. All of these elements must somehow find their way into an elegant design. The elements intersect throughout the novel with various degrees of symmetry, layered in a way that makes each element visible but none overpowering.

    Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of four novels and two award-winning story collections. Ger her latest novel, Golden State.

    Kidd’s book is a wonderful experience for anyone interested in graphic design or the visual arts. But it is also a powerful reminder that, as writers, we can find inspiration anywhere and everywhere.

  • A Handful of Glorious Pages

    This Is the Story of a Happy MarriageAre you a novelist, a short story writer, or both?

    I’m currently reading Ann Patchett’s essay collection, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, which chronicles Patchett’s journey to becoming a writer. There are plenty of quotable passages in the book, but one of my favorite has to do with the short story form:

    Love the short story for what it is: a handful of glorious pages that take you someplace you never knew you wanted to go.
    As both a novelist and a short story writer, I can tell you that I love the way stories happen: you write a sentence, and then another sentence, and a few weeks and twenty or so pages later, you have arrived at a totally unexpected destination.How does this differ from writing a novel? With a novel, while I don’t know exactly where I’m going or where and how the novel will end or what tangents it will take, I do usually begin with a general sense of direction. A sense of direction is important, because I know that a novel will require an investment of at least a couple of years. So I begin with a setting, a character, and a problem that needs to be solved or a question that begs to be answered.

    In my forthcoming novel, Golden State, for example, I began with two questions: 1) What would happen if California tried to secede from the nation in the present day? 2) What if the narrator’s estranged sister suddenly reappeared in her life? The novel was built from these questions, which married the personal with the political in a way that was very enjoyable to write and, I’ll admit, quite challenging to orchestrate.

    With a short story, I feel more free, because I know my investment of time will be much shorter. I often don’t know what the problem is when I begin, or even who the major players are. I start instead with language–a series of words that present themselves in my brain and somehow compel me to follow them with other words.

    Many novelists write only novels. Some short story writers write only stories. But the vast majority of published fiction writers do –or have done–some combination of both. Fiction writers frequently debut with a story collection, which is followed by a novel. One reason for this pattern, I believe, is that short stories tend to be the preferred form in graduate writing programs, so many writers come out of their MFA program with a story collection in near-publishable shape. After the writer gets a few good reviews and catches an agent’s eye with a story collection, he or she either a) decides that it would be fun to write a novel or b) concedes to the demands of the marketplace, which favors novels over story collections.

    As for me, writing novels is my bread and butter, and I never feel quite whole unless I’m working on a book-length project. In fact, I can’t remember a time in the past twelve years when I wasn’t working on a book! But there is sustenance to be had in short stories too, and when I am feeling tired of my novel-in-progress, or antsy, or simply inspired in a different direction, I often begin a short story.

    When you are feeling at wits’ end about your novel, I encourage you to set it aside for an hour or day or a week and begin a short story instead. It is possible that the writing of the story will push you back, joyfully, to your novel, and that you will abandon the story in short order for the bigger project. But it is also possible that you will sink blissfully into the freedom of the story, and that you will emerge, days or weeks later, with “a handful of glorious pages.”

    As always, happy writing! Please join the conversation on twitter, stop by my facebook page, or read (and submit) good stories at Fiction Attic.



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