I do love that about writ­ing and find myself miss­ing that aspect of it, being in that room, with just me and my writ­ing.

Yes, I con­tin­ue the obses­sion with tragedy in this Tuesday’s Flash Focus, begin­ning with Louis Ruprecht’s neat sum­ma­ry of the two pri­ma­ry con­flicts that emerge from Hegelian tragedy: (1) “the self comes into con­flict with the social and polit­i­cal pow­ers that be”; and (2) the indi­vid­ual comes into con­flict with “Des­tiny, the gods, and the will of the world” (42).

And I’d like to say, right here and now, there’s not a damn thing wrong with a stan­dard incan­des­cent light bulb, or its ener­gy dis­tri­b­u­tion (90% heat, 10% light). We glow how we can, Sara. And like you, your com­pact and sil­very flick­er­ing soul, the new effi­cient flu­o­res­cent bulbs con­tain a tox­ic and dead­ly core–mercury!

I found myself read­ing por­tions of Baker’s The Mez­za­nine out loud to who­ev­er passed by my chair–my wife, my son, our new Bichon. Here, you have to lis­ten to this. This guy’s talk­ing about earplugs.

Unlike the hard-earned last­ing epipha­nies in sto­ries, in life most (at least for me) are tiny and fleet­ing. They often come to me at the dai­ly rest stops, some­times in the show­er, often at the tops of stair­cas­es. As an exer­cise, I decid­ed to write some of these thoughts down for a day.

Pre­vi­ous posts took an intro­duc­to­ry look at Joseph Campbell’s Mon­o­myth and a more in-depth view of the first and sec­ond rites of Campbell’s mon­o­myth, the sep­a­ra­tion and the ini­ti­a­tion. Today, in the third part of the series, the focus turns to the end of stories–and the return.

My grand­fa­ther had always car­ried in his wal­let a poem I’d writ­ten him, and he’d stop peo­ple on the street to read it to them. That he did such a thing maybe has more with my being a writer today than any­thing else. At the time, few peo­ple believed in me.

Kathy Fish’s “Wren”–a fea­tured sto­ry in FRiGG –uti­lizes the encounter between healthy and unhealthy to reveal truths about both such states of exis­tence.

Frankly, I stum­bled into flash fic­tion and stag­gered around for a time. Despite writ­ing many short sto­ries and a cou­ple of nov­el man­u­scripts over the past sev­er­al years, it was only some ten months ago that I real­ly came on the online pub­lish­ing scene, plac­ing short sto­ries with Prick Of The Spin­dle, Iden­ti­ty The­o­ry, and Miran­da Lit­er­ary Mag­a­zine. Next came “Iron For The Soul” pub­lished in Word Riot. Through Word Riot I became famil­iar with the works of such immense­ly tal­ent­ed flash writ­ers as Elaine Chiew, Tai Dong Huai, Bon­nie ZoBell, and many more, all pub­lish­ing in the mag­a­zine around the same time as I.

List your famous and favorite very tiny micros here.