fiction

Entering the foyer, Royale already decided that he would thank Shake once more for being by his side at Keena__ recital. But she stunned him by eagerly waiting for him just like old times__n her knees wearing only a collar and a leash.

Movie. What's my favorite kind of movie?___s there a point to this?___lease, Lucy. What's my favorite movie?___orror. Why?___o reason,_ I sighed as I slouched back in the chair.__nd would you stop that! Please? It's distracting,_ she said as sheslammed her hand down on top of mine to stop me from twirling my ring.I jerked my hand out from under hers so I could cross my arms over mychest.__hat's with you today?_ Her tone was saturated with distaste.__othing.___ell, you're being awfully annoying for nothing to be wrong,_ sheretorted. __o ahead, Josh. I'm listening now.__ could feel the cold emanating from her and flowing in my direction. Ithad been this way for a while I just didn't want to see it.Danny and Josh looked at me and then awkwardly focused on otherthings.

Though in this genre we write about the fantastic, the stories work best when there is solid grounding in our world. Magic works best for me when it aligns with scientific principles. Worldbuilding works best when it draws from sources in our world. Characters work best when they__e grounded in solid human emotion and experience.

The regrets about all she had let go flooded her. Where had all that enterprise gone? All that energy? Why had she never traveled? Or had more sex when she could? She had bleached and annihilated every waking moment of the last twenty years. Anything, rather than feel.

Don__ trust anybody else__o matter how close you are to them._ (Eric)

Baby, God ain't gonna bless you with another woman's husband, not today, not tomorrow, not ever.

How often do you ignore a dream, dismiss it as fantasy and then see echoes of the dream around you the following day? What if a dream were the forewarning of what will become your reality; if you are being told within the world of a dream what may occur in the near or distant future, but your mind mangles the truth and information so much that you discard it as fiction?

You know there__ this gaping space between us, and if I leaned forward I__ grab Dex__ shirt without ever touching him. You know there__ a three-inch-thick glass wall separating us.Now we know, too.

The farmhouse sat on a rise at the end of a long dirt road, in a clearing surrounded by fruit trees and ninety acres of pines. It was painted white, and peeling, and some former hippie tenant had painted a mandala on the wall just inside the door with fine-point Magic Marker. I painted over it, but it bled through, again and again. I finally left it there, a pale and pastel version of itself, hanging ghostlike in the hall.

He had always liked a good mess__od knows he had sure made a few. In typical form, he squared his shoulders, furrowed his brows and muttered, __ring it on.

A man [Joyce] whose earliest stories appeared next to the manure prices in the Irish Homestead knew that columns of prose, like columns of shit, could both recultivate the earth.

Without stories, we__ have even more trouble recognizing what__ real.

I was hoping against hope he'd refill his Prozac so we could be in love again, but, sadly, that never happened.

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.)

Neither of us asked to be born descendants, yet I__ be rewarded with his death, and we couldn__ prevent that. No one could. (Eric)

Wherever you are lacking, your obedience in working on that before your mate comes is vital.

Any subject we exclude from fiction will drop from our culture's memory.

Charlee has my arm. She has my arm__y arm that__ rigid from pleasure, from her touch__n her little fingers. She holds my other one, too and she__ right there, that sweet candy perfume stripping the rest of the strength from my body, and it escapes in a soft, breathy sigh.