Flashes of Scribomancy

Scribomancy (n.): the art of discovering what you meant to write after you've already written it.

Some stories behave. Others… don't.

Flashes of Scribomancy gathers 36 short stories, scripts, and literary experiments exploring the magic and mischief of writing itself. Cozy one minute and chilling the next, funny more often than is strictly respectable, occasionally in verse and entirely on purpose—this is a collection that treats the short form as a laboratory and the reader as a willing accomplice.

Inside: a detective who can't see the face of the woman about to kill him. A dog keeping watch as the floodwater rises. A ghost who only wants to bake a pie. Six two-sentence stories with a body count. Screenplays, drabbles, hint fictions, an ode to a thoroughly disgraceful pet, a choose-your-own investigation set in the Old West that doesn't always end how you want, and a haiku for every rune in the Elder Futhark.

Together they form a record of a writer learning her craft—one revision, one risk, and one questionable decision at a time.

Stay through the final bonus section for a fully illustrated field guide—an earnest and disturbed public safety warning from Sheriff Tom Bracken, the Florida-suffering protagonist of the author's Cypress Run mysteries.

If you like short fiction with a touch of the strange, the self-aware, and the experimental, light up a candle and open the grimoire. Just be mindful: storytelling is magic, and not every spell behaves.