Oscar

So a short story I wrote has been featured as today's story of the day on the Fiction365 website. It's about a man and his semi-estranged wife. Check it out here.

Book Review

 I recently finished reading "Love Begins in Winter," a collection of five short stories by Simon Van Booy. I really enjoyed the author’s writing style, with short choppy sentences broken by one twisting, long one with semicolons. Lots of similes and metaphors and strange contrasts. It read very poetically with a strong sense of rhythm. I liked his portrayal of characters, how each of them had some kind of darkness beneath their surface. Each story weaved together threads of parents, children, guilt, and hope to form a mosaic that, when viewed from afar once finished with the book, really showed the intensity and power of love to change a person.

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 

Excerpts:

(12): “They will only be my parents once. They are the only parents I will ever have in the history of the universe. I wonder if they feel me thinking about them here in Quebec City in the rain – I wonder if they feel me like a small animal gnawing at them affectionately.”

(48): “From my pocket I took a large stone and set it squarely in his open hand. If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize – that was the moment."

Writing Short Stories

I used to abhor short story writing; there weren't enough plots and subplots and the page limit filled me with anxiety. But recently, I've decided to try my hand at writing some short stories, and although I've only got one or two so far, I'm going to persist with it. If you have any tips on writing short stories to share with me, please leave me some comments! 

For now, I'll post the first paragraph of a short story I recently wrote to whet your appetite: 

"The road wasn’t on the map but Gale Kringlebot, of the wealthy Manhattan Kringlebots, walked along its dusty, bumpy spine. His brown cowboy boots jangled loudly - a result of the gleaming silver spurs on their heels - and bit into his pinky toes. His normal New York stride slowed to a wincing teeter as he tried to walk on the inside arches of his feet to take the pressure off his last little toes.  The nostalgia that constantly ricocheted around in his chest hit especially hard as he thought about the black alligator-skin shoes he would be slipping on right now if he were back in the city, instead of here, in the middle-of-nowhere Nevada.  As he stumbled over a rock camouflaged by the dusty red dirt swirling up around him, Gale nearly cursed – “Son-of-a-!” - and vowed to talk to his father about the ill-fitting boots; his father would see to it that the shoemaker’s reputation plummeted like the stocks he was currently advising investors to hoard up fast, before they took to the rebound."