thisis.toddseal.com

The February 2006 edition of National Geographic Magazine has a cover story devoted to love. It begins with a short-short story of the author’s wedding day. Lauren Slater does a great job with narrative and description, really throughout the piece but particularly with that beginning story. That’s what made me think of writing some short-short stories. I’ve thought of putting together a short story collection for a long time, but all I keep writing are these really brief beginnings of things. Writing a story much longer than 2 or 3 pages seems daunting and I never get much further. If I take those beginnings and tighten things up a bit, I’d have a fair amount of short-short stories and… Anyhow, here’s today’s effort.
Read more of “Quick“

My bathroom sink sits, draining terribly slowly. This happened quite suddenly and right now I can’t even hear the faintest whisper of the water swirling down the drain. I’ve tried the plunger and some microbiotic drain cleaner that’s always my first defense. Nothing’s happened. I started to wonder what I would do if I could never unplug it. What if all my drains were stopped up? What if I couldn’t find a plummer? This beginning of a story popped into my head shortly after that.
Read more of “Walter And The Amazing Pipes“

Coming soon, from the twisted mind of Clive Barker, the strange imagination of Stephen King, and the frightening vision of newcomer Mark Z. Danielewski…

This summer, fear The Booblegger!

Watch out; he’s coming to boob you.

During dinner, we watched a news segment on bootlegged copies of the new Star Wars film. It sounded like the reporter said “booblegger” and this is more or less the joke I made out of it. It’s not very funny now, I know, but maybe it’ll give me (or you) and idea for a story later. I tried drawing a picture of it, but it looked too pathetic.

INSPIRATION: Daily, I see thug fashion in just about every caste of high school life. All of those categories of kids that I recall being distinguishable by the clothes they wore, those identifiers are gone as all groups of kids sport LRG, Rocca Wear, and other “urban wear” clothing. And for all that posturing, most of those kids, even the ones who talk a tough game, are just kids who want to look cool, not kids who want to do bad things. By appearance, the bark is far worse than the bite. And what if those tough looking kids we all walk past at various times each day and we see on TV, well, what if those kids were really “momma’s boys”? Read more of “Wanna Be O.G.“

INSPIRATION: Well, the combination of a bit of Chandon sparkling wine and being tired conspired to make me write this. Once again, you see the mention of my generic male character, Ron. I really hope he does some tricks for me one of these days…
Read more of “Drifting Off To Sleep“

I have no idea who this main character is. To be honest, I simply needed a name for him and Ron is someone that already exists in my stories (Ron has become my default male character name), so I chose a different name. Maybe this actually is Ron, though. I hope to find out in the next month.
Read more of “Who is Brian?“

INSPIRATION: Vanessa was signed up to chaperone senior prom. I laughed and said two words: have fun. I had no intent of going. Then, I found out that the prom was on our 6-year anniversary. Well, in an effort to hang out with her a little bit, I agreed to go. We enjoyed our day before the prom, then got dressed up to go. She didn’t stay for long (bad night for her), but we did get to see a few students on their big high-school night.
Read more of “Senior Prom as an Adult“

Since this is a place for me to write and for you to comment, I will occasionally take the opporunity to post things I’ve written, little bits of short stories that either never panned out or just ended too soon. Right now is one of those opportunities. I ended up doing more with Ron (the main character in this bit), but this little section might just stand on its own.
Read more of “Short-short Story: Graduation“