Living the Fictional Dream

The past couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of craziness, made up mostly of home improvement projects (specifically, getting everything ready for new carpet to be laid in the nursery and the master bedroom).

With all that home improvement going on, publication of the inaugural issue of 10Flash totally snuck up on me! But, it is live today, and everyone should go check it out. What are you waiting for? Do it now!

K.C. has done a great job compiling an awesome line-up of stories for the first issue based on the theme of a librarian on vacation in a foreign land. If you have time, you should check out all 11 of the stories in this issue (they are all flash — it won’t take you that much time!), but if you don’t have time to read them all, I do want to point out to you “Four Liars” by my writing group mate, Alex, and “The Scorpion-Charmer’s Daughter” by Gay Degani, a regular commenter on this blog.

My story in this issue is called “The Last Ball at Concord House.” When K.C. invited me to submit a story for this issue, I wasn’t sure what tack to take on the librarian theme. I really wanted to write a story about Sarah Kirby, the main character from “The Widow and the Stranger,” as she seemed like just the type of woman this theme was meant to embrace. Howeer, Sarah is a shopkeeper on vacation, not a librarian, so I nixed that idea.

Then my writing group had its monthly prompts contest, and one of the prompts was to write a story about the belle of the ball who had a secret. I got this image of a librarian crashing a high society ball while trying to conceal the fact that she is a mere librarian, and suddenly, I was off a running on “The Last Ball at Concord House.”

Of course, the story needed an element of the fantastic, as well, so I mixed in a little of one of my favorite supernatural elements (the one that gives me the most cold chills), and the story came together (with a little post-first-draft help from my writing group).

If you read tLBaCH, I’d love to know what you think of it. You can leave a comment here on this blog, or you can leave a comment over at 10Flash.

Again, congrats to K.C. for putting together a really great first issue, and congrats to all the contributing authors. I haven’t had time to read all of them yet, but I can’t wait to do so!