My Writerly Blog

The Maker’s Diet - Diet is based on the Bible; subtitle: "The 40-Day Health Experience That Will Change Your Life Forever" This book is number 132 on USA Today’s top 150 book list. I had to rub my eyes and refresh the page when I saw the description. Seriously, how far are they going to reach for diets? I’m fairly positive a dozen suits in a boardroom came up with this one, and then found some penniless and desperate writer to shamefully pen it for them. “Let’s get all those fatties in the Bible belt! They’ll believe anything if we say it comes from the Bible!!!” If I looked hard enough, I could probably find praise for McDonald’s in the Bible. Are we getting to the point were religious bookstores will now sell Bibles with web-site-like sidebars proclaiming Mark 3:21 as a God’s approval of spray-on hair? The saddest part about it is that people buy it. It’s like it’s gospel or something. Here we are, in the infancy of the 21st century, 60-some-odd-years after discovering the...

Welcome to the twentieth Storyblogging Carnival. Previous Storyblogging Carnivals are archived here . Today we have ten entries from some of our favorite writers. Please note: As this is my first time hosting the carnival, I may have gotten things screwy. Let me know if links don't work, etc. Thanks! Enjoy! ________________________________________________ A sarcastic cyborg debriefs by Mark A. Rayner of The Skwib A 325 word short short rated PG-13. Imagining what a Dalek might say to a government interviewer when captured. This is skwibby fiction: stories inspired by news and current events (in this case a New Scientist piece about the nature of sarcasm). ________________________________________________ The Frog Vice-President: A Long Limbed Tale by Jason Pomerantz of Fiddle and Burn: A Daily Comic Strip in Prose A short satire, rated PG. A fairy tale of the present, ripped from today's headlines. ________________________________________________ The Meaning of a Flush by E...

“Dr. Fuller?” “Yuh-huh?” “I can’t…I dunno what I’m s’posed to say here.” The caller paused, his voice gravelly with misery and dirt. “She asked me to call you soon as… She wanted you to come to El Paso.” “She who?” “Chrissy.” That was the word last night that brought me instantly awake. I sat up in bed, waving at Fern to go back to sleep. The connection wasn’t great, and I had no idea who this man was or why he was calling me at 3:16 in the morning, but he sure as hell knew the magic name. Chrissy. I hadn’t heard from her in probably ten years, save for two or three postcards featuring jackalopes and cacti with sunglasses. Regardless, when the man called, I jumped, leaving my disapproving wife, my three confused daughters, and my struggling medical practice while I galloped madly across Lone Star country to my childhood soulmate. The state of Texas, from the Panhandle to Corpus Christi, from the Rio Grande to Texarkhana, has given birth to so many singular breeds of men it’s a w...

The words “cheap” and “wedding” don’t often stutter-step down the aisle together. The average wedding nowadays goes for somewhere in the ballpark of a down payment on a house – not a shack, not a one-bedroom tin-can, but a respectable two-story with a garage and plenty of schools close by. “The budget of that wedding today was more in the ballpark of the down payment on a Ford Probe. I was so overdressed in my sundress and fancy wide-brimmed wedding hat, I felt like the Duchess of York at J-Lo’s backyard barbecue,” Leslie lamented, flopping on the bed in her dress that Sarah Ferguson would only have worn in her pre-royalty days, slumming it. Maybe. “Your ‘wedding hat’?” Roy repeated, stripping off his dress shirt and tossing it blindly across the room. “I didn’t think there was any such thing.” “Of course there’s not any such thing as a wedding hat.” She twirled the object in question on her finger, admiring its sleek grace, and feeling rather stuck up about how stylish it had ma...

The dogs outside announced his arrival. Charlotte stared at him as he hobbled toward the front door. She wished her mother were here to tell her what to do. She wished there were another way. He rang the doorbell; she reached for the rifle, knowing that today was to be one of those days when the gun was the only thing old Nate Whiting might listen to. Though she’d known it was coming, the chime of the doorbell still startled her. Clutching the butt of the gun – a twenty-year-old .22 he’d given her for her sixteenth birthday – she gathered up the emotions that kept her waking up to answer his call every day, and swung the heavy oak door wide open. “Morning, Dad,” she said through the screen door. He squinted at her, placing her face. “Which one’re you?” “Charlotte, Dad.” “Speak up!” “I’m Charlotte,” she repeated loudly. She cracked open the screen door, letting in a brace of biting winter air, and hollered at the dogs. “Hush up!” The dogs’ yapping trailed off. Her father grunt...

I recently received a forwarded email that I actually read and enjoyed. In my snottiness and sophistication, I generally delete forwards without even reading them – so to avoid bad luck from chain letters and sappy “this is what a true friend is/pass it on so you know God loves you” junk – this one came from a reliable source: my best friend. It was a list of “Things You’ll Never Hear a Woman Say.” Being rabid sports fans, my friend and I had issues with several of these “things”: 1. “While you were in the bathroom, they went for it on fourth down and missed. If they can hold them to a field goal, they’ll still cover.” Okay, first of all, what sports-fan-female dates or watches football with a brain-numb dope who goes to the bathroom on fourth and short when the game is on the line?!? Especially if it’s not only the game in doubt, but your gambling money. This is like those people who just HAVE to go out for Junior Mints right when the FBI agent is about to figure it all out and...

In response to the vomit-inducing, over-marketed holiday that is Valentine’s Day, I would like to lobby to have a new holiday on the yearly calendar: Losers’ Day. Really, Valentine’s Day is redundant. Couples already get to do cool, sappy, “togetherness” things on every other holiday. Why do they need another day solely devoted to them? We always talk about what couples did for V-Day. Romantic dinner, buckets of ice and champagne, $100 flower arrangements and hip-expanding boxes of chocolates. Don’t forget the trendy “propose in a hot-air balloon shaped like a heart” story. But what do the single people do on V-Day? We sit around and feel sorry for ourselves and hug the teddy bears our mothers gave us because they felt sorry for us, too. So I have an idea: Losers’ Day. Couples not allowed to participate. There is no PDA on Losers’ Day, or candy hearts or flowers or jewelry commercials. This day is all about us, the lonely ones, the ones with more battery-operated devices than...