Rattled Mind

This episode begins a period in my life where I tried to write one flash fiction story a week. That effort was successful for about half a year. This story kicked off that effort which started just prior to the spring of COVID, and securing the border was all the news. As you may ascertain from my description of God, the President was quite the prominent figure at the time. This episode is a short one, but I think you will enjoy it.

The inspiration for this first story comes from what any writer wishes they had…time. More time to be exact. See, most of us have day jobs and scrounge writing time out of lunch breaks, after the kids are put to bed, or some quiet time on the weekends. I wrote most of my first book while going down the road as a local truck driver. Microphone headset strapped on, dictating to Dragon Naturally speaking.

Even if you have an abundance of time in the evenings, there were other distractions, or you’re just simply too damn tired to get your mind in a creative mode. I wrote a large majority of my second book in the evening.

After spending a day burning up my creative juices solving technology problems for a local school district. When it came time to edit, I realized it would be better just to rewrite it.

I am not one for time travel, multidimensional universes, or other such hocus pocus (I know, and I fancy myself as a Sci-Fi writer?) But the inspiration for this next story came from a profound need to find uninterrupted writing time when my creative juices were at their best.

We all dream of do overs. Many of us wish we could go back and undo that one thing. Make a fifty-fifty decision go the other way.

This story is another take on that wish. Near the end of his life, Fletcher is given a chance to go back and undo his single biggest wrong.

If you are driving a semi-truck through southwestern Wyoming on a moonlit night, and the winds are calm. The way the blue light of the moon reflects off the layered rock formations almost looks as though you are underwater…

For those of us with an imaginative bent, the mind takes over.

This is the last of the Earth First shorts. Stories taken from a planned trilogy. The story shows that no matter how powerful you are, or how high in society you live, no one is immune to tragedy.

This story was taken directly from a chapter in Earth First. I did do some editing to make it better stand on its own.

This story is number two of the Earth First tales I created to promote the never finished Trilogy. I created Herb to give us a glimpse of life on earth long after the Exodus. Life in the only city left when the last humans, so the church thought, rocketed into space. When I finished the story, I liked the character so much, I decided he would find a place in the full-length version of Earth First

Hope you enjoy the story.

The next three stories are shorts written to promote a trilogy I started writing almost two decades ago. I finished the first book and had notes for the next two. The title of that first book was Earth First. That project was tabled as I struggled with the editing of the first book. Fixing something when you’re still learning to write is quite a chore.

Exodus was an early attempt at Flash Fiction, but it grew out of control. It is a prequel to the story found in Earth First. However, as I sit here writing this intro, I wonder if I should rethink the ordering of my trilogy. Hmmm, stay tuned.

One of the things I hear most often when a new presidential elections cycle starts up is, “but he doesn’t have the experience.”

I have read the Constitution, and it says nothing about requiring experience to be President of the United States. In fact, it has two requirements. One is natural born, and the other is age. If you want to know the minimum age…go read the Constitution.

The reason I bristle when the experience issue is brought up is simple. Our government is so entrenched that we could elect a native-born chimpanzee, and most people wouldn’t notice. Well aside from the fact that most presidents are tall men, and chimpanzees are not very tall.

As I processed this concept, the odds of becoming president entered into my thoughts, and then the old mantra I heard from my grandmother growing up, “Don’t you want to be President some day?”

A spark of an idea became a story, and since there really wasn’t much basis for something lengthy, flash fiction became the outlet.

A long time ago I decided I needed to start writing four thousand words or less short stories. At the time, I was getting seriously into the hobby of freshwater aquariums. Saltwater was an ambition, but that step was just too expensive.

As I thrashed through the crap that floated about in my mind, looking for a concept for a short story that I could fit into four thousand words or less, my multitude of aquariums became an inspiration. The story, however, swelled well beyond four thousand words.

One of my weaknesses at the time.

Please enjoy...

This is story number two that was inspired by the concept of mega corporations or tech giants going to blows. This one being from the point of view of one of the combatants.

Remember the reference to the fast-food wars in the movie, The Demolition Man, starring Sylvester Stallone?

The following two stories are akin to that idea. Not because I wanted to take the idea of fast-food wars and apply it to tech giants, or corporate behemoths. The concept for the next two stories popped into my head as a result of the mega corporations we have today. The Googles, Amazons, Microsoft, et al. I think the thought process was, as these corporations get bigger, and entwine themselves deeper into our lives, and each other’s niches, i.e., operating systems, cloud services, home automation, they will quit competing on the open market, and come to blows.

The government would stay out of the way or limit the conflict because they did not want to lose their tax revenue stream, or bribes, or political gains, garnered from said corporations, and their conflicts.

I was never good at predictions. Somewhere in the late to mid-90’s, after discovering email, online banking, and electronic bill pay, I predicted that the post office would be gone in ten years.

Resilient damn thing…isn’t it?

I also predicted a few years later, that eventually everyone will be on some sort of psychotropic medication. Every mood would be a clinical diagnosis, and your family physician would prescribe the fix in pill form.

My imagination took this one step further and decided that waiting for a prescription was not going to be enough. The government would force a preventative on all of us.