I’m not a Plotnik

I never plot any story. The characters do that. The only thing that guides me is how I want the story to FEEL - or, should I say, how do I want the reader to feel about the characters, what the characters’ve done in the course of the story, what(in the reader’s opinion) the characters've become in the course of the story? But mine’s not just a "feel good" thing. Some of my stories don’t feel all that stinking good - like Dirty Rotten. I mean, bizarre or perverse feels good to some people, but that's not the reason that BB-gun flash-fiction is on my menu. Even in that little piece of grotesquerie, I tried to reach people and persons who might just, for instance, be still daring enough to think and risk and endure for happily ever after.

 

Joe Smolen

Joe C. Smolen, AKA L.W. Smolen is an Oregon Coast writer of insufficiently exaggerated notoriety. Never having been arrested, he lives with his wife Sherrie and the ghost of their black, Standard Poodle Rico Suave in a really pretty good, Prairie Style house they built themselves. Since the Literary Magazine Fleas on the Dog of Kitchener, Ontario has permanently stopped accepting submissions, in order to read L.W. Smolen’s 2021 short fiction, A Real Guy, you are referred to joecsmolen.com. Some of L.W’s other, subsequent short fictions are archived at Olive Tree Review, Ginosko, Cardinal Sins Journal, Wrath Bearing Tree, Wilderness House and etc. Kirkus reviews once interpreted his work favorably.

https://joecsmolen.com
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I Just Wanted a Cookie

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Revising Training Wheel Mother