As a follow up to Creating a Monster….
The Voices page is up and running at Eclectic Flash. Anybody who wants to hear my sweet little chipmunk voice reading Bowling Night, a micro flash tale I dreamed up about a despicable murder should go Here to check it out.
Shoo the children from the room first though. We don't want a repeat of Cat's daughter being delighted and thinking that I was just telling a sweet little tale about a man cooking dinner for his friend…..
Mick had been selling door to door for over two hundred years. His toes had taken a real beating in that time. You don't get company provided steel toed shoes until you hit the two hundred and fiftieth year; that is unless you decide to pay for them out of pocket and Mick had always been a cheapskate.
Even though his flimsy shoes offered little to no protection, Mick would slide his right foot over the threshold as soon as the mark opened up, and leave it there no matter how many times they slammed the door. Oh, some of the musicians and artists recognized a kindred spirit right away and swung the door wide, but when he was confronted with the eggheads and the inventors they often resisted his charms and really put wear and tear on his foot.
But Mick would keep on spewing his spiel, until something caught their interest. Mick knew that the best thing he had going for him besides the lack of feeling in his foot was that his product never went out of style. If he could just keep the sucker interested long enough they invariably bit.
Who wouldn't want eternal life? Oh, not the kind you get from King James, or the kind that demons are said to offer from time to time to hapless goofs who sell their souls willy nilly. No, what Mick carried door to door was something that every mortal lusted after.
Fame.
That thing that every soul at one time or another had craved….. be it fifteen minutes worth or not.
Mick had been bitten as a young lad with the need for fame and after he'd signed up had been elevated through the ranks of indentured servitude until he was so useful that his immortality now had staying power. He was famous for all time. No one hit wonder was he. Mick had even worked the problem with his dead right foot into his act. It had morphed in to his signature cock of the walk dance.
He only had a couple of regrets. He regretted signing on for a three hundred year stint, it could get grueling touring the globe while he was supposed to be on hiatus from touring with the band, and he regretted not taking the Dorian Gray clause. But he consoled himself with the fact that even if he had, he would never have looked as good as Sting, who was a goddamned alien after all……and he'd never, no matter how long he lived or how long he toured, look as bad as Keith.
I've been hearing for a couple of weeks that some folks are having a hard time distinguishing my fiction from my anecdotes. I'm not sure what this says about either my writing skills or my life….
But I think that it might say that apparently I live a much more exciting life than I had heretofore realized.
[YES!.....I've always wanted to use heretofore in a sentence]
When I started with the Friday flash group, I posted all of my fiction in italics, but I got feedback that it was too hard to read that way, so I went back to posting fiction the same way that I publish my daily posts.
And now I feel awful that I did because yesterday a much loved friend read Lament without realizing that it was fiction. And she was gut punched by it. I felt bad enough gut punching the readers over the weekend who had been warned via twitter and word of mouth that it was a desperately sad story, let alone gobsmacking an innocent friend…..
So I've gone through and marked all of my flash with the words "flash fiction."
But just so you know……I didn't mark Famous last words……a zombie western as fiction…..for two reasons……. [1] the title takes up the whole line, and [2] if there's anyone out there who can't tell that a zombie western is fiction I think that it may be time to ask the nurse to dial down the morphine drip.
Ok, I've been on twitter now for forty six days. I've tweeted Seven hundred plus times. I only typed lol [cringe] twice and I've managed to quell a lot of my bluer knee jerk reactions to other people's tweets.
Well, mostly quell. I've found that the later in the day it is the harder it gets. Being restricted to one hundred and forty characters somehow really makes me want to work blue. I mean it's not like in a blog post where your ideas have the space to swell and you have time to generously oil your ideas so that you can slowly slide your thoughts into their proper spots while taking the time to gently ….. um… as I was saying….
