Creating Income and Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction

On Wednesday April 22, 2020, I'll be presenting in one of Jane Friedman's online classes.

Jane is a consistently reliable authoritative source of solid information about the writing and publishing industry. Her blog and The Hotsheet are two amazing resources I regularly consume. I'm honored that I get to participate in one of her online workshops.

Creating Income & Connecting with Readers Using Short Fiction

The course is $20 USD and will be a video chat where I'll be talking through several of the examples that Matty Dalrymple and I wrote about in our February 2020 book, Taking the Short Tack.

I will share many of the examples that we write about in the book as well several other options and examples with the goal of informing and inspiring authors on how they can leverage their short fiction IP in multiple ways.

Two-Sentence Horror Stories

I recently spotted a few two-sentence horror stories and was enjoying reading them. So I wanted to try writing one of my own.

One of the first that came to me was based on a poem I wrote and had published years ago. I suppose it's okay to re-adapt my own writing into this new form.

So, here's the first two-sentence horror story I came up with:

"She has her daddy's eyes. In a jar up in her room."

 

This two-sentence horror story is derived from a poem I wrote called "Daddy's Girl" and which was originally published in Everyday Weirdness in 2009. The two first lines of the poem came to me many many years ago as a quick and dark humor punch-line that I later morphed into a poem (below) - but I figured: why not re-adapt it back to those first two sentences?

Daddy's Girl

By Mark Leslie

She has her Daddy’s eyes
In a jar up in her room
It took a while to dig them out
Because she’d used a spoon

She has her Daddy’s hair
And with it his whole scalp
She hacked it off with a dull steak knife
But knew a sharper one might help

She has the rest of her Daddy’s parts
Stored in an air-tight drum
She fancies herself a Daddy’s girl
But she looks more like her Mum

But enough of the original poem and back to the two-sentence horror tale.

Do you have a favorite two-sentence horror story to share?