I walked through the main campus of the University of Pittsburgh today for the first time in weeks. I live in Oakland, the neighborhood the main campus is in but I hadn’t actually walked through the campus for awhile.
I graduated with an MFA in fiction writing from Pitt in 2006 at the age of 59. Not bad for a Vietnam War veteran. As I walked through the campus I wondered if I would meet any faculty or staff that I knew or meet any classmates or students I had taught as a teaching assistant. The campus was empty. Summer vacation.
I got into the graduate program because of the flash fiction and very short stories I submitted for evaluation.
Here are five stories based on my time at Pitt.
Girls Gone Wild (A Short Story)
Money and the American Writer (A Short Story)
Woman, Wife and Lover (A Short Story)
The Modern American Woman (A Short Story)
Vietnam in the Mist (A Short Story)
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Do You Know Why Most Fiction Writers Fail?
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They give up. I don’t mean give up on a story. They give up on being writers. They don’t want to put in the years that it takes to learn to control the language. They don’t want to read hundreds of good books by really good writers. They don’t want to learn the grammar, and the spelling and the punctuation. They don’t want to spend years getting rejection notices and little or no money.
If I had given up on becoming a writer in my 20s or 30s or 40s, I would have never written an Ebook, won a K. LeRoy Irvis Fellowship and graduated with an MFA in fiction writing.
I would not be a full-time blogger.
If you are a writer, understand that you are a writer for life. You will probably have to make a living doing a lot of other things besides writing; but keep writing. That’s what writers do.
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Kim Kardashian is more than just a pretty face. She’s a smart businesswoman.
PS: There are a lot of mainstream, literary and erotic stories on this blog but only one flash fiction porn story is available. It is A Porn Star Is Born at the top of the page.
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