love | Lori Schafer's Short Subjects I Feel Like Writing About

My flash fiction romance “Delayed Connection” has been published in Romance Flash:

http://romanceflash.com/stories/81-delayed-connection

Kind of a funny story behind this piece. It started out as a story I was writing for The Pittsburgh Flash Fiction Gazette, to which I am a somewhat regular contributor. The original version, which will appear in the Gazette in March, is called “Missed Connection,” and, like much of my erotic flash fiction, it deals with the subject of lost love and is correspondingly dark in tone. Well, when that was done, I liked the idea behind it so much that I wrote another piece with the same premise – a chance meeting at an airport – but in an entirely different style, and with a bona fide happy ending to boot. Similar story, but in two versions: one “dirty,” and one “nice.” I confess I was somewhat surprised at how sweet the “nice” version turned out. Hmm, maybe there’s a romantic in me after all!

I loved the scenario of running into a former love interest at the airport, with one person about to get on a plane, and the other just getting off one. We’ve all been there, right? We’ve all had that fantasy of bumping into someone we once cared about in an unexpected place, and having all the things we always hoped would happen finally happen. It rarely works out that way in real life, of course. You never run into Mr. or Ms. Lost Love ever again, or if you do, it turns out there were solid reasons why you never hooked up in the first place. Still a pleasant fantasy, though. And like Billy Joel says, sometimes a fantasy is all you need.

My flash fiction romance “The Sublet” has been published in Romance Flash:

http://romanceflash.com/stories/75-the-sublet

This story is actually a modified excerpt from my forthcoming novel My Life with Michael: A Story of Sex and Beer for the Middle-Aged. They say that publishing excerpts from your novels is good strategy, and maybe it is. But don’t kid yourself into thinking it saves time because you’re recycling something you’ve already written. If anything, it takes longer than writing a story from scratch. First, you have to build a frame story around a segment that was intended to be a much longer work. Second, you have to make it self-contained, which means adding and getting rid of stuff that no longer fits in the revised version. And finally, you have to adjust the length to make it work for the market for which you’re shooting, and in the case of flash fiction, this can be daunting indeed.

I like the frame story I chose here, which is completely unrelated to the plot of my book. The idea that people are no longer forced to stay in a particular place for work and are thus free to move around as much as they like intrigued me. Perhaps I get that from my days as a professional eBay seller, when I routinely traveled several months of the year and worked on the road. In the modern world the scenario is perfectly plausible, and for people without roots or strings tying them down to one location, the thought of simply packing your suitcase and moving on whenever you felt like it might have some appeal. On the other hand, it would definitely interfere with your love life. Suddenly, instead of just hanging out to see what happens with your new relationship, you have to consciously decide – do you stay or move on when your time’s supposed to be up?

Fortunately, this particular section of my book didn’t require a tremendous effort in order to make it self-contained, which is one of the reasons I chose it. Except for at the beginning, there weren’t a lot of references to events that happened earlier, and those were fairly simple to excise. Trying to get the word count down to under a thousand was awful, though. I started out with seventeen hundred, and after I’d whittled it down as much as I thought I possibly could, I still had twelve hundred words. After I took out the final two hundred, I was afraid the story didn’t make sense as a story anymore, so I set it aside for a while so I could read it with fresh eyes. I guess it must have worked, though, because the good people at Romance Flash decided to publish it. I only hope the readers like it, too!

You can download more FREE excerpts from My Life with Michael from your favorite eBook retailer. Please visit the book’s webpage for more information.