September has always been my launch month.
2019 is special, I have just become a pensioner – which is to say that I have reached sixty-five years of age. It has been five years since I launched Sixty Plus and that seems a good reason to move on and begin something new or at least a variation. I hope my readers have enjoyed my flash fiction weekly posts. They were fun to do and share. Starting in September, I-Write will have a monthly feature that will showcase short stories I have had published.
For my first post I have chosen a pair of stories that were inspired by some quirky reading. Chiffon Cake’s main character has a curious condition. She not only remembers things from her childhood, she experiences them or to quote the story - “Certain things that I saw once, (previous optical impressions is the term he uses) return in a sort of hallucination.” Add in a cookbook and a grandchild and an intrusive relative and voila – Chiffon Cake. This story was published by Half Way Down the Stairs in 2016.
The second story is Woman’s Battalion of Death, also published in 2016. Danforth Review featured this story in November – the month where our veterans are remembered. My source for this story was a book titled ‘Women writers from World War 1’. The writings were diary, letters home and reports – not what I expected but very interesting nonetheless. The report that became Woman’s Battalion of Death was bare-bones dry facts that I dramatized with imagined details and voice.
