After several rewarding careers in various design industries, I have expanded my efforts to writing fiction. This new endeavor may seem unrelated to my previous ones, but I see the challenge and excitement of creating new worlds and situations on paper very similar to creating new pieces of furniture, company logos, or websites. I take the tools and materials we are all familiar with in our real and tangible world, then fashion and mold them into new ones using words. The results can be inspiring, exciting, and I hope surprising.

Presently, my chosen form is the short story. I'm still finding my footing as a writer, so the short story format allows me to experiment with plot, character, and description in brief bursts. If I fail, I've not invested months of time nor reams of paper. Paper? you may ask. Don't you use a computer? Yes, I do. But I've discovered printing a story out on paper, and then reading it aloud to myself reveals many more errors in wording, cadence, and even typos, than when editing on a computer screen.

I've decided to go the digital publishing route. It's fairly well known how difficult it is to get published in print. (The recent best-selling novel, The Help, was rejected by twenty publishers before it found a home.) I don't have the required patience for that. I'd rather spend my time writing, than submitting my stories endlessly to publishers and waiting for any replies.

Short stories and books can be published online to Amazon and Barnes and Noble, to name just two, in a few hours. Perhaps I don't have the "fire-in-the-belly" drive required to be a print-published author. C'est la vie. I love writing stories, and if a few of you find them online and enjoy reading them, I'll be a happy writer. And if a print publishers finds them worthwhile to take a chance on, all the better.

Two Fiction Sketches
"Gretchen"          "Ten Percent Arnie"