Sorry for the slightly pompous title of this post, but it’s been so long since I last posted that I do feel somewhat like the mythical bird. I see that my last post was in April, five months ago. At the time, I felt that creating and editing the short stories that I post to the blog were taking up too much of my time, preventing me from working on long-form writing. Also, I noticed that my blog stories were getting longer, breaking the mold of flash or short-short fiction. Clearly I needed to write longer. So I decided to get back to the long-form for a bit and take a hiatus from the adrenaline rush of writing short-short stories.

There have been positives and negatives. On the plus side, I am almost finished with a SF novel that I began last year. Soon it will be edit and re-write time. Need a break before that. On the minus side, I miss the quick thrill of writing and posting short stories. They’re very addictive to create and withdrawing from the process takes a toll, as I found out.

Anyway, my birthday is coming around and I though I’d treat myself by dabbling once again. I set out to write a piece of flash fiction, maybe six hundred plus words but not more than a thousand. Alas for my good intentions, I got carried away (like I usually do) and by the time I finished, a day later, the story was twenty-three hundred plus words and no longer flash fiction. Not even a short-short story. Still, I had fun writing it. I got the idea off an obscure writing prompt and ended up with a dystopian urban science fiction tale.

It’s called AFTERWHERE,  listed on the main page and also tagged as “Short Story”. Hope you like it.