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The Loss of George
* This week, I learned much too late of the passing of my favorite professor and one of the best people I knew, George Friedman. He passed away in late February. Every once in a while someone comes along and makes an impression on your life. That person, for me, came in the form of Dr. George Friedman, professor of English at Towson University. George, as I came to call him, was the singular inspiration for my first novel, Beneath the Mimosa Tree, which began as a short story in George’s class—Writing Creative Short Fiction—during my first master’s degree. When he returned a short story I wrote, and verbally told…
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Franco and The Blonde: Fiction Friday
Today, I’m trying my hand at a bit of short fiction. This piece of flash fiction is under 600 words at 595 words. This scene popped into my head last night, perhaps because at dinner, our family was talking about our Italian heritage and the legacies we leave behind (I know…a little heavy for a dinner conversation during a coronavirus crisis). Nonetheless, I knew I was going to write this scene when I went to bed last night, and I banged it out this morning, just to touch base with my creativity. I’m so immersed in teaching 4 online courses right now, that I have little time for something like…
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FRIDAY FICTION – A Short Story from a Collection
*** They can’t all be happy endings. While my novels always tend to have a happy ending, my short stories do not. I don’t know why they go down this way. It seems to me like short stories—writing in the short form—allows you to write more pointedly, and that, in turn leads sometimes to unhappy little vignettes. This piece is loosely based on a dream I had. I will say nothing else about it, and I change things around, of course, because it’s fiction as opposed to non-fiction. This will end up being the first half or third of a short story which I hope to include in my collection…
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A Piece of Short Fiction For Fiction Friday: “Time”
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any short creative fiction that I’m working on, and that’s primarily because I haven’t been working on any short fiction. I’ve been working on writing a novel, but all this talk about creativity in the classroom this week caused this story to pop into my head. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, I seize the opportunity to make it work. I hope you enjoy it. TIME: A Short Story It was my idea to go. I needed to clear my head and take a break from the mundane, toxic, sad life that had enveloped us both and made us strangers…
