After my family rented a house within walking distance of a public library, I visited the children department and signed up for the summer reading program to read a dozen books in three months. I would get a gold star for every book I read from the recommended fourth-grade reading list and a diploma at the end of summer. Things didn’t work out that way. I read a dozen books in a single day.
The children librarian wasn’t happy about my rapid progress and accused me of cheating. I took the accusation in stride. After being misdiagnosed as mentally retarded as a young child, and shuffled around the county in little yellow buses to the Special Ed classes, I got used to adults underestimating my abilities.
Besides being a fast reader, I had a photographic memory for what I read. (I later graduated from the eighth grade with a college-level reading comprehension.) The librarian made me recite line-by-line several of the picture books. When that proved too easy, I described what picture was on each page for each book. She reluctantly gave me my gold stars. My diploma arrived in the mail at the end of summer.
I didn’t bother to sign up the following year.
With the content pipeline broken and nothing fresh to submit for publication, I’m going to publish 13 flash stories on Fictionaut this summer. Unlike the summer reading program of my misbegotten childhood, I’m not giving out any gold stars or diplomas. You can read and comment on each weekly flash story for FREE.
- Golem Got The Beach Balls (6/27/2013)
- Terror From Above (7/3/2013)
- Falling Earthward (7/10/2013)
- Trillion Dollar Odds (7/17/2013)
- A Butterfly For A Married Woman (7/24/2013)
- Flash’em Tag’em Bag’em (8/1/2013)
- Killed Twice Over (8/21/2013)
- Ultra Menoetius (9/4/2013)
- Circling The Drain (9/19/2013)
- The Editor Is Always Right (9/25/2013)
- Zombies At The Movies (9/29/2013)
The flash stories in this series are those previously slated for publication in a flash anthology before Pill Hill Press went under earlier this year and the rights reverted back to me, and newly written content based on a flash story idea list from a failed NaNoWriMo project. All the flash stories will come out in forthcoming flash stories ebook.
Updated 29 September 2013: A Summer of Flash Stories 2013 came to a close with a few flash stories short of a baker’s dozen, as two of the flash stories became short stories that are now circulating in the slush piles to face a cruel world of rejections.