Jake Freivald, Editor

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I really had fun with this issue. Well, except for the computer crash right before the publication date. That was miserable. Everything about the issue, though, is upbeat.

I don’t know what to tell you about “Suddenly Speaking” by Ray Vukcevich. The guy’s just not normal. (I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide whether I’m talking about Ray or his protagonist.) The story comes as a jolt to the system, a surrealistic shock, starting with its first sentence: It suddenly hits me that I speak Japanese. I couldn’t have written this story, but I really like reading it.

Our second story, “Doofus” by Mark Patrick Morehead, is more normal. Incredibly normal. I think I was that kid, in fact. But even so, it has everything I want in a story: suspense, urgency, character, plot, a hint of romance, and even a twist — an utterly normal twist — that makes this story really entertaining.

Patrick Lundrigan’s “How High The Moon” is the future of slice-of-life romantic fiction — the far, far future of it. It’s as human as any robot story I can think of, and I’m not even sure who’s supposed to be the robot. There’s a pleasing coincidence, too: Its title is the name of a song (YouTube) by Les Paul, the brilliant guitarist who passed away in August. Although we’re not happy about his passing, we’re happy that we had already planned for the story to run this month, and that Patrick wanted to dedicate the story to Les Paul’s memory. The guitar in the photographs is the author’s Les Paul-model Gibson.

This month’s Classic Flash is from the venerable British humor magazine Punch. “Miranda’s Will” doesn’t have a very thick plot, but it shows the exercise of some thick skin. After reading it, I have to wonder whether young people have changed so much from that time (1914) to this.

Bruce Holland Rogers is back this month wrapping up his discussion of the MICE (Milieu, Idea, Character, and Event) quotient. His story isn’t featured on the home page because it’s not a complete story; it’s an example of unfinished, unrevised work based on the discussion in his column. Go read both.

Finally, I added a review this month. When I heard about the Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Fiction, I had to check it out. I’m glad I did: my thoughts on this publication are here. In short, I liked it.

Many thanks to our contributors this month. Advertising only makes a dent in our costs, so any donations you make go directly to paying authors.

God willing and the PC don’t crash, we’ll be back on October 1. Our line-up will be the award-winning Kristine Kathryn Rusch's “Eating It Too”, S. Craig Renfroe’s horror story “Death Babies”, and Damon Shaw’s “The Door”. Don’t miss it!