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Center of Insurance Against Villains

speculative fiction by H.M. Wheat

The neighborhood was built in the seventies and didn’t seem to have been upgraded at all since then. All the houses were squat, single-level A-frames or ranch-styles, with enough wood paneling and painted brick to scare off even the bravest house flippers. In her three-year-old Honda, Nicole should have felt out of place. Instead, she watched as a Honda a little newer than hers parked in a nearby driveway, letting out a tumble of a small family with middle grade boys. A moving truck was close behind them, stalling at the curb with its hazards on. 

Nicole had been under the impression that no one wanted to live in New Dale. She remembered watching the exodus on the news when she was in high school, the bumper-to-bumper traffic crowding on her television screen as citizens fled the city. Superheroes had recently come into prominence in the city, and with them had come supervillains. New Dale was deemed unsafe, and everyone with sense had gotten out. 

Or so Nicole had thought. There were flowers in the window boxes on the house across the street, and an older woman was watering a lush green lawn a few houses down.

The screen in her dashboard gave the time as 9:56, so Nicole waited another two minutes, watching as the family with the Honda began unloading boxes from the moving truck. At 9:58, she gracefully exited her vehicle with the case folder in hand, making sure to lock it before she stepped too far away. At 9:59, she was walking up the well-groomed path to the front door. At 10:00, she knocked.

Continue reading this story on Substack.

H.M. Wheat holds a Bachelor of Arts in English from East Texas Baptist University, and is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in English (Creative Writing) at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her poetry has appeared in Riveted Literary.

I am the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf on pleasure, reading, & the survival of literature

Despite her knowledge of Greek and her voracious reading of the classics, Virginia Woolf considered herself a self-taught reader. As a woman, she had been denied the illustrious Oxford education that the men in her family enjoyed. As it turns out, her lack of affectation, her insistence on taking pleasure in reading, is what makes her essays on literature so lucid, smart, and delicious to read.

Reviewing The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Volume 6: 1933-1941, for the December issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Benjamin Schwarz notes that, despite Woolf’s place in “the highest stratum of the English intellectual aristocracy,” her essays were written not for the academic but for the common reader, the category in which she rather modestly placed herself. The common reader, she posited, “reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others.”


Here, Schwarz excerpts Woolf’s essay “Hours in a Library”:

A reader must check the desire for learning at the outset; if knowledge sticks to him well and good, but to go in pursuit of it, to read on a system, to become a specialist or an authority, is very apt to kill…the more humane passion for pure and disinterested reading. The true reader is a man of intense curiosity; of ideas; open-minded and communicative, to whom eating is more the nature of brisk exercise in the open wire than of a sheltered study.

For all of her wealth and status–the very condition that allowed her the coveted room of one’s own–Woolf also believed passionatelym Schwarz notes, in the democracy of reading, as evidenced in her essay “The Leaning Tower.”

Literature is no one’s private ground; literature is common ground.

Woolf’s prescription for the survival of literature, which might have ruffled feathers in her time, is no less meaningful today. Literature will survive, she wrote,

if commoners and outsiders like ourselves make that country our own country…teach ourselves how to read and how to write, how to preserve and how to create.Read More »I am the Common Reader: Virginia Woolf on pleasure, reading, & the survival of literature

10 Steps to Writing a Novel

The first thing you need to know about writing a novel is that there are no easy answers. There’s no magic formula for novel-writing. Every novel demands its own structure, its own pace, its own way of looking at the world.

Still with me? Good. Because, as it turns out, novel writing isn’t just a head-banging exercise in utter frustration and despair (although, trust me, sometimes it is just that). It’s also a deep swim into your own head space, a really fun adventure, and one of the most thrillingly creative things a person can do. It’s your world; you get to make it, populate it, cultivate it, and bring all of the pieces together.

If you’re ready to take on the challenge of writing a novel, continue reading for 10 steps to get your started.

1. Consider the setting.
Setting encompasses not only place, but also time. Where does your novel happen, and when?

2. Consider the point of view.
Who is telling the story, from what distance? Do you have a first-person narrator who is at the center of the action, an omniscient narrator who is able to go into the thoughts of any character at any time, a limited third person narration that sticks closely to one character?Read More »10 Steps to Writing a Novel

How to Start a Story

storystarterscover2smallOne of the questions I hear frequently from aspiring writers is, “How do I start a story?” Even seasoned writers have days when the story won’t come. Talking to a reporter for Interview Magazine in 1995, Martin Amis said of novel-writing, “If I come up against a brick wall, I’ll just go and play snooker or something or sleep on it, and my subconscious will fix it for me.” Good advice, for sure. But if snooker and the subconscious don’t do it for you, here are a few tips to get you going.

  • You can begin “in medias res,” or in the middle of the action. When you’re telling a friend a story, you rarely begin with, “I was born in such-and-such hospital in such-and-such city.” Rather, you jump forward to the exciting part, the middle of the action of your own life. “I was standing in front of the old movie theater on Amsterdam Avenue when…”
  • You can begin with a character in a strange or tense situation (Gregor Samsa wakes up as a cockroach in “The Metamorphosis”, Mersault is on trial for murder in “The Stranger”).

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