Monthly Archives: September 2025

Anatomy of a Story: Envy, a User’s Guide

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The origin story for my recently published piece, Envy, a User’s Guide (published here at Eulogy Press) is on one hand simple, and on the other hand, hard as hell.

Several months ago I took an online workshop on microfiction. What’s microfiction? It’s one of the latest in a series of subcategories of literature, mostly defined by length. You probably know of short stories and novels (short vs long). There are also novellas (longer than short stories) and novelettes (longer than novellas but not quite novels). 

And then on the other end of short stories there’s flash, which is 1000 words or less. Now, writing a complete story in 1000 words or less is pretty damn hard. But you can go even shorter. With microfiction we’re talking about 400 words max. 

(Disclaimer: there aren’t hard and fast rules. Surely people will have different guidelines for these lengths.)

I’ve dabbled in shorter than short. Like, 150-word pieces. I even got a 100-word story published. The thing is, at that length, you have to jettison just about everything that makes writing (and reading)  fun: the color, the expansiveness, the luxuriousness, the flavor. And it’s HARD. I think the shortest story most people know is this six-word one from Hemingway:

Baby shoes for sale, never worn.

Great in terms of giving some heartache with the fewest words. But that’s about it.

Still, I took this online course in microfiction, and one of the things they stressed was using that constricted canvas to experiment, to let your story live in a borderless zone between prose and poetry. Get a little wacky. 

So I decided to give it another shot. I went in thinking less about telling a traditional story and instead I viewed it as a way to convey a different kind of reality. The one I chose relates to my favorite deadly sin. Envy. I wanted to get into the head of someone who experiences envy as a crippling, phenomena. I wanted to present envy as a physical reality versus an ephemeral one. I wanted to get as close to personifying envy as Envy as I could without making it a literal person.

The hardest part of this story was the wordsmithing. When you’ve got only so many words, every one of them has to do a ton of work. I revised, at the same cafe, morning after morning, a couple weeks straight, to the point where I almost killed it (that feeling when you’ve wrung out every bit of originality and smothered all the life out of it). Apparently I didn’t, because some brave editor out there responded to it and published it.

Am I eager to take on another microfiction piece again? Not so much. But I did learn something valuable: don’t shy away from taking on a writing challenge. You never know when you can create a bit of art out of it.

Power Prompts: Episode 4

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We’re back for another round. The challenge: write a story in 20 minutes using the following prompts:

Characters: Heart surgeon and Astronaut

Setting: A wine cellar

Genre: Cozy mystery

Trope: A very cheap date

POV/tense: Third person future

And the result:

The Case of the Orange Feather

It will be Betty who first notices the safe. Open, with a single orange feather resting on the bottom.

“That wasn’t like that before,” she’ll tell Alex.

“What do you mean?”

“When you first brought me here, down here to this wine cellar, of all places…”

“Of all places, what do you mean by that?” Alex will say.

“A first date is supposed to be romantic. Dinner, candlelight. Not, mildew and hypothermia.”

He’ll slide up close to her and wrap an arm around her. “How could I ever impress the best heart surgeon in the county by dropping five Benjamins at a steakhouse. I know that a woman like you deserves better. So I figured I’d bring you to a wine cellar—I was on the space shuttle a decade ago with the guy who owns it—and we can explore a little.”

“Explore as crack open a bottle of something pricey?”

He’ll raise his hands in mock surrender. “Hold on now, these bottles go for a grand a pop. I don’t think so.”

She’ll grunt at him, deservedly so, but she won’t be ready to end the date, not quite yet. “What about the safe?”

“What about it?”

“I know for a fact it was locked when we came down here. Did your friend, this mysterious friend, come back in when you were leading me through one of the caverns here?”

Alex will scratch his chin. “No.” He’ll reach in the safe and pick up the feather. “Strange. My friend has a parrot back home. But I don’t think it had orange feathers. Or did it. Hey, do birds have orange feathers?”

“I don’t know.”

Suddenly the lights will turn off. Betty will yelp and Alex will reach for her hand in the dark. She’ll find it and grab it. Then he’ll whip out his phone and shine the flashlight, revealing nothing but dark rows of dusty wine bottles.

Behind them, a crash.

“What was that?”

“I…I don’t know,” Alex will say.

“If this is some kind of practical joke, or scheme to make you fall for me…I know about how adrenaline can affect people, and I’m telling you, I’m not falling for it.”

“This isn’t a game. Trust me.”

Together they’ll walk closer toward the sound of the noise. They’ll turn a corner and see on the floor a busted bottle of 1901 Pinot Noir, the red wine flowing in a rivulet until it reaches a man’s loafer, and attached to the loafer a leg, and a body. While Alex shines the light on the man Betty will reach down and with her trained hands she’ll determine that the man is indeed…

“Dead,” she’ll say.

“I’m guessing he was stealing this prized bottle when he bit it,” Alex will say.

Betty will raise her hand to her mouth. “Who could have done this?”

Alex will hear a rustling from above. He’ll shine his light up and spot the biggest parrot he’s ever seen, the proof of what the parrot did on its claws and beak.

“Guard parrot,” he’ll say. “Who would’ve seen that coming?”