I thought it might be fun to share with you today something I’ve been using to torture the monsters and quietly judge people. I didn’t make this up, in fact there’s probably a hashtag about it.

First world problems.

What’s a first world problem? It’s any problem that wouldn’t be a problem without the amazing privilege we people who live in first world countries have. Like complaining that there are too many options when buying mascara, or bitching that your very expensive sound system isn’t working right and you have to have someone come fix it.

Basically anything that would make some poor kid who’s never had his own toothbrush would want to throat punch you for complaining about.

I’m not saying that we don’t deserve to complain. Everyone’s got problems, and I know there are days when enough has just been enough and the last straw is something that on most days would have made you laugh in other circumstances. I’m not talking about that here. And in case you’re wondering, I am totally guilty of some of these myself. The mascara thing was me. Really, it’s like there are other kinds of eyelashes besides mine or something.

Here are some first world problems, though, that I think everyone needs to shut the hell up about.

Electronics

And there are two parts to this one. First, I am sick to death of hearing older people complaining about how complicated electronics are. I am sick of hearing older people use their age as a reason to not get educated about modern technology. Not everyone needs to be a tech head. I understand that technology is complicated and not everyone is going to understand even some of it. And that’s fine. Don’t have it. Or if you do have it, learn about it with an open mind. But bitching that the device that I hold in my hand and can hold all of my books, music, tv, movies, play games and give me access to my work anywhere I am is ‘too complicated’ is foolish. It is too complicated for you, not everyone else.

I am also sick, to death, of people my age complaining that they don’t have the newest and the best. I am thankful to have a tablet that was brand new last year. I intend to have it until it dies. Yes, there are newer ones, ‘better ones’. But I don’t need it, and neither do you.

Studying

This is one I get into fights with my monsters about all the time. Your school is free, and you get to go to it without being shot at, despite your vagina. You have access to knowledge that will help you get a good job and support yourself without having to wait on people. And there’s a change we might even be able to send you to college, so that you can be anything you want. All you have to do is take in that information, learn it.

For those of you who are in college, you’ve got a lot of things to complain about my friends. The price of education is bullshit, most of you guys are working to keep yourselves fed. But don’t bitch about studying. For every college kid scraping to get by, there are five kids in your hometown who couldn’t afford to go at all. I was one of those kids.

And if you’re one of the few who’s parents could afford to send you, I don’t want to hear a single word.

Cleaning

Raise your hand if you’ve complained about cleaning in the past twenty-four hours. Yep, there’s mine up there. I am so bad at this, and I need to just stop it. Wait, I have to fill my washing machine with all of the really nice clothes I own? I have to vacuum my soft, fluffy carpet? I have to pick up all the expensive stuff I buy that is now all through the house that I live in. I have to make dinner, have to make dinner! I’ve missed meals before, what the hell am I doing complaining about the fact that I have to make dinner?

So maybe we should shut the hell up about keeping house.

I know that there are a lot of things to complain about. Since I might not have a lot of writing news in the next few weeks, you might hear some of mine. But I’m going to try really hard to not complain about these things, here or to people I talk to in the real world. I am blessed, to have electronics I didn’t think would exist when I was a kid, to be able to send my children to school without fear, and to have a home to care for. I am grateful for those things.

Short stories are kind of a new writers right of passage. We all write them when we’re first starting out to start building a publishing record, make a little extra money, and learn how to write. I’m sure you know I love short stories, since I publish them here all the time. I love that I get the chance to write about something completely different than Woven sometimes. And I especially love writing scary short stories. They’re fun.

The question is, what’s the difference between good short fiction and bad. Because let me tell you, there is some bad short fiction out there. There’s some short fiction that makes you want to rip the writers teeth out, and a lot of it is written by overly emotional teenagers.

It’s not the same as flash fiction. Flash fiction, as we discussed last week, is a moment. Short fiction is, at least it should be, a whole story, just not a very long one. It’s not the same as a novel, either. In a novel you will likely have plots, sub plots, lots of character development, and all sorts of things like that. A short story usually just has one plot, and there’s little room for much else.

If you want to write good short stories, and you should, here are some things that separate the good from the bad.

Not every short story has to have a moral. I don’t know why every writer seems to feel that short fiction is the vehicle for social change, but it doesn’t have to be. Yes, a lot of my short stories have morals, but not all. Gracie, for instance, is just a scary story about a little girl. Warm is just a story about a man who lost his wife. Even the stories that do have morals didn’t start out that way. I just wrote a story, and a moral came out.

If it’s going to have a moral, don’t beat anyone over the head with it. You don’t have the words and your reader doesn’t have the time. Subtlety is a great trait to learn in all of your writing, but especially in short stories.

The twist is the best thing about a short story. It’s really my favorite part about this writing form. No other way to write lends itself more to the twist, the surprise ending. The caller was upstairs the whole time holy crow moment. That’s why so many short stories are horror. They’re great for the twist.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re writing a mini book. You’re not. If you have more to say than you can say in 30,000 words, what you have there is not a short story. The theory here is that you should be able to read or listen to a short story in one sitting.

But it still needs to make sense! Please don’t think that just because a twist is good that a twist that doesn’t add up is okay. Don’t think that just because you’re not writing a novel you can do things that are totally illogical. I can’t tell you how many short stories I read that wander off on tangents and don’t actually go anywhere!

Your short story is still a story. It needs a beginning and an end. Even if that end is only a few scenes. We need a start and a finish, or you’ve failed.

Make me care about what’s happening quick. Because I don’t have pages to start asking questions about this world, or caring about this MC. I need to know, in the first few sentences, why I want to read this.

Homework: Read some short stories. Think about how they made you feel, and how that emotional reaction is different than that of a novel. Then, go watch any of the Pixar short films. They are amazing examples of just how awesome a short story can be.

So I actually thought I’d done this one already, but it turns out I didn’t. Sorry about that. Here, then is Fantasy and Science Fiction.

Genre- Fantasy and Science fiction. With that title, you probably weren’t planning to send in your historical fiction piece

Word Count- Not listed. They’re very open.

Payout- 7 to 10 cents a word.

Wait Time- Generally about eight weeks

And that’s all the information they give. Very to the point, this magazine.

Here is your list of full submission guidelines.

Want even more markets? Sign up for The Road To Full Time, to get a huge list of fiction markets delivered to your inbox every month.

Re blogging for Throwback Thursday.

I had a book come out last month. Maybe you heard me talk about it. I have another book coming out this month, called Days. I’m just a little proud of it. You know, just a touch.

And that’s going to be it for awhile. I’ve got some work to do on Broken Patterns before I send it out again, (So much for being done.) I’ve got a new project, but it’s still in rough draft form. And I haven’t written any short pieces, since I’ve been working on this new thing. Seriously, if I don’t get some written soon there will be no new short pieces from me next month, and I know how devastated all of you (just me) will be by that.

My harvest came in. I finished three books and got to do all the fun things that finishing books brings. I have started marketing, set up at least one book review, even sold a couple (one) copies (copy). Now it’s time to start sowing again.

Actually, I started sowing as soon as I was done. When I finished Broken Patterns, I started on the second draft of Starting Chains, Draft one having been written in between the third and fourth versions of Broken Patterns. When I finished Days, I started writing short stories for upcoming books. When I published Thirty Days, I started planning for this year’s Thirty Days event, and the book that will come after it.

Even starting right away, though, it’s going to be a long time before another book of mine is published. I have a lot of sowing to do before another season of harvest.

I should get back to it.

There was a time when I had no idea what flash fiction was. When I learned what it was, I hated the thought. What was the point, I thought, of trying to condense a story into 500 words or less? Wasn’t a short story bad enough? How could I ever fall in love with a character in just a few pages, let alone a few paragraphs?

Then I read some truly amazing flash fiction, and realized what an impact it can carry. Then I wrote a few, and found the poetry and power that flash fiction lends itself to so beautifully.

I believe that every writer should write flash fiction. The benefits are just too numerous to ignore.

• You can use flash fiction to explore worlds, situations, and voices you aren’t sure you want to devote pages and pages to.
• You learn brevity from writing flash fiction. There is just no room for long windedness.
• You learn to tighten your writing. Even when you’re not writing flash fiction. If you learn to see the fatty words in a sentence, you start seeing them in all of your sentences. Even insanely long fantasy series.

If you’ve never written flash fiction, though, please understand that it is entirely different than any other fiction you will ever write. It’s not a whole story, or a whole world. It’s not going to show character growth, or tell of an adventure where the hero saves the distressed person. There will be no love interest, no secondary plots. Don’t write flash fiction like it’s just a mini short story, in other words. Write it like this, instead.

Show a moment. It doesn’t need to be a defining moment, but it can be. It doesn’t need to be a first moment, or a last moment, but it can be.

The important thing about that moment, is that it have some sort of emotional impact. It should make the reader feel something. It doesn’t have to be something deep. Maybe the emotion is laughter. Maybe it’s just creepy. Tumbler has a whole section of one or two sentence scary stories. But maybe it is deep. Maybe it’s a box of gold jewelry at the guard’s station outside of a Jewish ghetto in Germany. Maybe it’s an A plus term paper set next to a bottle of caffeine pills and a razor. Maybe it’s a brand new soccer ball being given to a boy who doesn’t even own his own tooth brush.

Your moment should allude to a bigger story, though. Take any of those examples, and I bet you could write a whole novel. Lots of them, in fact. How many teenage dramas talk about the pressure to succeed in school, or cutting? Lots. And you could sink boats with the amount of fiction written about the Holocaust.

Now, we’ll stop here a moment, and talk about why we would bother, then. Why write flash if you can just write a novel about something emotional like that?

Because many of these large moments are too big for us to really fathom.

Let me share something with you as an example. I was fifteen on September 11th, 2001. I sat in school, and was told that our country had been attacked. First attack on the US from a foreign enemy since Pearl Harbor, and all that. It was emotional. It was sad. I didn’t really get that upset about it. It was a terrible thing, but it didn’t have any direct effect on my life. There were no faces attached to this for me.

Then Daniel Pearl, an American journalist, was kidnapped and murdered by Pakistani militants. This was too small for me to ignore. I lost my shit over this guy, who I had never even heard of before. It was because he was a journalist, and I wanted to be a journalist. It was because he was doing what I wanted to do, and he died for it. It was because it was a small enough tragedy for my mind to comprehend. It would have made a great flash fiction piece.

To put it another way, a novel is a train accident, a space shuttle going off to Venus, a mighty hero on a quest. Flash fiction is a blood stained baby shoe on the pavement, a man seeing Earth grass for what he knows is the last time (I’m going to write that), a cup of wine after the saddle bags are packed.

Homework: Write five flash fiction pieces this week, one for each week day. Don’t judge them for at least a week. Don’t complain, it’s only 500 words and you get Saturday off.

I think this is a magazine I’m going to be committing a lot of time to. Science Fiction and Fantasy is a good, old school fiction magazine. I’m not old school about a lot of things, but I do miss the bygone days of fiction magazines like Creepshow.

Genre- Honestly, if you can’t guess by the title, creative writing might not be the career for you.

Word count- non specific

Payout- 7 to 12 cents per word

Wait time- Eight weeks

Rights- Not list

Here is your link to full submission guidelines.

Want even more markets? Sign up for the Road To Full Time to get the ever growing list of short fiction markets.

That title seems redundant, in my opinion. In any case, it’s still a pretty awesome place to submit your science fiction short stories to. It pays well and has a really good reputation for producing some pretty awesome short fiction.

Genre- Science Fiction.

Word Count- Between 1,000 to 75,000

Payout- Eight cents a word

Sub Date- Anytime

Wait time- Usually about five weeks

Here is your link to the full submission guidelines.

Want even more markets? Sign up for The Road To Full Time, and get the ever growing list of markets in your in box, every month.

Re blogging for Throwback Thursday.