Monthly Archives: March 2026

Power Prompts: Episode 7

by in fiction, movies, Titanic, writing prompts and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Heroic dog, Oscar-winning actor

Genre: True Crime

Setting: The set of the movie Titanic

Trope: Body double

POV/tense: Writer’s choice

And the result:

On a sunny Tuesday morning, Hollywood legend Kathy Bates was found bludgeoned to death underneath the Kraft services table on the set of the movie Titanic. The murder weapon, the oscar she won for her role in the movie Misery, lay at her feet. The head of that golden statuette was dented, and stuck to it was a piece of her bloody scalp.

James Cameron, the embattled director, was ruled out as a suspect. Not immediately, at first. The detectives spent five hours interviewing him in one of the steerage cabins. He cried, literal tears running down his face. Sobbing, in fact. At that moment, Titanic wasn’t the worldwide smash it’s remembered as. Rather it was steering course toward flopland, over budget, over schedule. The hollywood press got a perverse glee in reporting every setback. And the murder of the beloved actress was considered the ultimate iceberg that would sink Titanic forever.

The set closed for two weeks. Leonardo DiCaprio, not yet the A-lister he is now, spent those days holed up in a West Hollywood dive downing pint after pint of Guinness, alone, or with some male friends. Rumors spread that it was he who might have bashed Kathy’s skull with mister gold, seeing as he lost his sole nomination. But when one of the detectives arm wrestled DiCaprio, he was quickly stricken from the suspect list.

Next up was Kate Winslet. She took her hiatus in stride, spending her mornings by the pool of her Hollywood Hills hacienda drinking martinis with her corgi on her lap. The dectives interviewturned up nothing susplcious. She merely claimed howmmuch she absolutely adored Bates, and how she could never imagine harming such a glorious thespian. Winslet was stricken from the list, primarily because of her refined British accent.

Weeks turned into months. Cameron begged the LAPD to let him restart shooting—they’d recast her role with Dolly Parton—but it was a no. The culprit had to be found. Justice demanded it.

At a complete loss, the LAPD brought their finest detective to the set. Her name was Wilma, a one hundred and nineteen pound German Shepherd, who’d proven herself in a strinng of drug busts. If anyone could crack the case it would be her.

The detectives brought her to the set and set her free of her leash. Wilma roamed the floors of the ship. Believe it or not, Cameron had actually built an almost life-size replica of the Titanic. Wilma padded and sniffed but nothing.

Then they brought her to the stars trailers. First, DiCaprio’s, where Wilma showed little interest. Then Winslet’s, then all the other minor stars, none of their names remembered.

Hope was nearly lost. The case would never be solved. Cameron’s career would be ruined. Just as the dectives were about to leash up Wilma and load her in the back of the cruiser her ears perked up. She raced off to one of the minor trailers and padded at the door. Inside, she streaked toward the rear and pawed at a black briefcase buried beneath a pile of vintage dresses.

The detectives opened it. Inside were photos of Kathy Bates, all of them with her head cut off, or her body mangled. They even found a voodoo doll with pins sticking in it. The detectives noticed a nametag on the briefcase. It belonged to one Betty-Ann Carmichael: Kathy Bates’ body double.

Carmichael had been a struggling actor for decades. This had been her biggest role since a doublemint gum commercial in 1987.

She confessed to the murder two days later. And that solved the mystery of the most shocking crime in Hollywood since the murder of Sharon Tate.

Anatomy of a Story: Skeet

by in fiction, publishing, writing and tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

I tend to write stories in groups, as in I have specific themes I want to convey, or things I want to say, and it takes me a bit of prose to work it all out. These past several months I’ve been working on three stories, three very different characters in three very different circumstances dealing with things suppressed. I suppose all writers (or at least those with some level of self-awareness) do this. Our selves come through in our stories–what we like, what we don’t like, what we’re screaming to tell the world.

My story, Skeet, just published here by Virgo Venus Press, is one of those stories. I remember when I wrote it, roughly, and it was around the same time I wrote another story (which, ironically enough, was also just published). Both stories were similar in the sense that I was interested in exploring how men specifically deal with emotional despair, trauma, and plain old adversity. Men, just men. That was the main genesis for Skeet.

In brief, Skeet is about Mason and Colby and their afternoon of skeet shooting. Mason’s got some very recent grief he’s working through. Colby’s got his issues, too. Instead of emoting, the men talk around their pain, and in doing so, they share and they connect.

The second inspiration was more left-brained. I really appreciate when a writer shares some technical info about a hobby they enjoy. For instance, I love snowboarding, and I wrote a short story about that. I also like skeet shooting (though I’ve only done it about a dozen times). I wanted to write about it, so I did.

Skeet shooting, or clay pigeons, is a blast, in every sense. Using a shotgun, you shoot orange discs as they fly across the sky. I love that pure moment of focus when the disc is soaring and you have to aim and steady and fire. The world falls away. Past, gone. Future, irrelevant. In Skeet, these two men inhabit that space as they navigate their pain.

There was another inspiration behind this story. I was at a dinner party and ended up talking to a classical musician named Erich Barganier. I looked up his YouTube channel and clicked on one of the videos, one called Flyover Country. It’s a book of poems by John McCarthy read aloud and accompanied by an orchestra. (I assume Erich composed the music, and that John is the guy reading the poems.) I’m not particularly a fan of classical music or poetry, but something about the combo hooked me. The music is jarring. The poetry is powerful and visual. I must have listened to the hourlong piece twenty times.

One specific passage stuck in my mind: the author loses a tooth and plants it in a field expecting flowers to grow. (He’s much more visual and poetic than what I just wrote there.) I thought, what if something else grew instead? Something sinister? Or at least, what if my character believed that? This became the heart of my story.

Funny thing is I didn’t think Skeet would ever find a home. It’s strange and it’s subtle, more pensive than plot-oriented. But it stuck with me. Even to this day.

Power Prompts: Episode 6

by in fiction, writing, writing prompts, Madonna, Mafia and tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The challenge: write a short story in 20 minutes using the following:

Characters: Madonna and a mafia boss

Genre: Coming of age

Setting: CIA headquarters

Trope: Broken-down vehicle

POV/tense: Second/present

And the result:

Like a Virgin

The only thing you ever wanted to be was a CIA spook, just like your father. But here you are, a month shy of 20, on an internship at CIA Headquarters, but instead of sitting in some cushy office with the AC blasting going over dental records from some serial killer’s victims, you’re in the hot and sweaty bowels of the building. Not just bowels as in depth, but also bowels as in it stinks, like someone’s been stuffing bodies in the wall and not even prepping them with lye.

Mister Sunshine is making you clean out an old busted Chevy Malibu that’s sitting in a parking bay. Why there’s a parking bay all the way down here, and how the car even got here in the first place, is one of those mysteries of life that you’ll never solve.

“How’d it get here?” you ask stupidly.

“It fell off a truck,” he says, then laughs and goes back to chomping his cigar. He likes to use lame mafia jokes, maybe because he is a lame mafia joke, an ex mob boss who got a sweetheart deal from the government in exchange for becoming one of them.

You climb in the backseat with a bucket full of fabuloso and scrub what looks to be animal entrails from the carpet. After about an hour of this all you want to do is take the hottest shower ever when you hear a tap on the window. You ignore it. The taps get more frantic.

“Jeez, don Corleone, I’m fist deep in gristle. Gimme a break why don’t you.”

“Excuse me?” a lady’s voice says.

It pings something familiar in you. When you turn you see a tiny blonde woman. Her face looks overstuffed and pulled but her body is sick. You stare at her. She meets your gaze and does not smile and then it hits you.

“Holy shit, you look like that old lady, Madonna.”

“Old???” she says in a low voice that sounds like murder.

“No, I mean…”

She sighs. “Yes, I am her, and no, she is not old. Next question.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Good. Then keep your mouth shut and listen to me very carefully. I want this car cleaned by end of day. And when I say cleaned I mean pristine. Like clean enough for a woman to give birth to a baby in it. Get me?”

You run your hand over fragments of bone. “Seriously?”

“Yes.” She twists a gold pendant that hangs in her cleavage. “Stop staring. It’s rude.”

“Wait, what are you doing here?” You ask.

She rolls her eyes. “I work here. What do you think, you dolt?”

“Madonna’s in the CIA?”

“Madonna’s in the CIA,” she mimics in a high pitched voice.

“I don’t talk like that.”

She smirks. “You’re new here, aren’t you.” She doesn’t wait for an answer. “I need that car tonight. Spotless. It’s a gibbous moon and the sacrifice must go off without a hitch or else we’re in a world of trouble. And by world I mean world. Our world. The whole world.”

“What are you going to do with this car?”

She flings her hands in the air. “I just told you. It has to be clean enough for a birth. The baby, that’s all that matters.”

“And the mother?”

She shoots you a withering look. “That’s not for you to know. Any other questions, smart boy?”

“No ma’am.

“Don’t you ma’am me.”

Just like she orders, you finish scrubbing. And when you go home, tired and sour, you vow that you will never set foot in that cursed place again. So much for becoming a spook.