A Competitive Story

Written By Joe Smolen

I’ve just got to have a competitive story. Gimme a good story, a story, the first page of which detonates, a story that tears along, that "shakes your windows and rattles your walls," breaks the sound barrier with a BWHHOOOM! N o t  M a n y  S u c h  S t o r i e s  A r o u n d. I spot ‘em where I do, by happy, heart-leap surprise, like finding a heart-shaped rock on a barren beach.  Just the other day, considering it for publication in a new, on-line "little mag," I read a short fiction obviously written by someone in India. Over there, on the sub-continent they know what competition REALLY is, but the writer had dared to submit his story to an English-speaking Literary Magazine based in the U.S.A. The man's English was kina crippled, but the authenticity and the story that came through his messed-up English syntax was wonderful. I rated the story an 8 on a scale of 1-10, nit-nat mechanical problems or not. To have that story make the cut would be a win for a truly artistic story-teller.🤪

 

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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