Storytellersunplugged

I'm a little overwhelmed, as usual, with things clutching and dragging at me, but I wanted to take a little bit of time to talk about how schedules and best-laid plans can go to Hell in a handbasket, as my step-dad was fond of saying. I've spent a very chaotic few years bouncing form personal disaster to personal disaster, writing in mad sporadic bursts and not writing in molasses-thick periods of lethargy. I have written novels that are better than ... Read More

I have been making the same drive back and forth from Hertford, NC to Chesapeake, VA for over five years now. It's a long, solitary stretch - and over time, things have added up in my mind until it's like navigating some other dimension. On the drive home last Sunday, a final pin dropped in the silence, and I heard the echo. I wrote this specially for my extra Halloween Storytellers gift to you all... Since we have no poster ... Read More

--Sarah Monette Prey use the word "love" like it means something. He said he loved me. He asked if I loved him, too. I said I did, because I didn't want to argue. I just wanted to fuck. I pay for a mass for the dead because I don't know what else to do. I stand in the back of the church, cold, nervous, smelling fear and incense and mold. The priests are trying not to look at me. It's just me and them ... Read More

Its about 10 PM and I figure if I start typing now, I'll finish this post by midnight, so there you go. Years ago, there was some small press magazine that wanted every story to start with "I stared death in the face." I never wrote anything for said mag, but the idea of Death with a capital D as another individual stuck in my head until I had a titled to go with it. It actually wasn't long ... Read More

Because autumn stories don't necessarily have to be about Halloween. Enjoy the season... *** For The Autumn Queen, Where She Rests Among The Fallen To Tommy, it was a leaf. Oh, it was a beautiful leaf, to be certain, five-tined, like a maple, and blood-red at the edges with lines like yellow and orange flames in the center. And when he saw it on the sidewalk on his way home from school, resting among the dead and withered brown husks, he knew he had to take it ... Read More

Aftermath by Janet Berliner NOTE: This story was originally written at the request of Richard Dansky for Jerusalem at Night, a Vampire: The Dark Ages supplemental rulebook. In Canaan, which was also known as the land of Israel, in the spring of the year Christians called 1197, Moslems prayed openly but with a sense of unease. Jews, for whom the spring coincided with the celebration of Passover, called the year 4957. They prayed, too, in secret and with no less nervousness. Moslems and Jews alike ... Read More

By Stan Ridgley The urge to be a "travel writer" overcomes even the best of us at times -- of this I am convinced. Call it the urge to "travel write." I like to believe that I overcame the urge many years ago, purged of the urge, as it were. Purged of it by the recognition that the sights, sounds, smells, and exotica of a foreign land fall inevitably flat, given that such writing is invested with our own egos, which are often wrapped into ... Read More

Many of my fellow Storytellers Unplugged authors have opted to post a story in place of their usual essay this month. I think that's a fine idea, so I've decided to do the same. However, instead of posting one of my scary shorts, I've decided to share an original, unpublished young adult fantasy novelette, The Ghost Who Loved Books. The Ghost Who Loved Books is a story based around the characters, settings, and situations in a currently unpublished young adult fantasy novel, first ... Read More

By Richard Steinberg “Coleridge wasa drug addict. Poe was an alcoholic. Marlowe was killed by a man whom he was treacherously trying to stab. Pope took money to keep a woman's name out of a satire then wrote a piece so that she could still be recognized anyhow. Chatterton killed himself. Byron was accused of incest. Do you still want to be a writer - and if so, why?” Bennett Cerf It’s a question I ask myself frequently.  It’s not to be “happy,” whatever that means.  Referring ... Read More

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway considered his best work to be his shortest, a six-word story that went like this: For sale: baby shoes, never worn. Last November, Wired lined up a lot of writers to take a crack at the six-word short. In that vein, here are three such devilish, abbreviated tales for the Halloween season. ------------------------------------- "Let's split up." Later: "Nooo!" "Nooo!" ------------------------------------- The world ends not with a—. ------------------------------------- "Brains!" "Brains!" "Brains!" BLAM! BLAM! Click. Read More