I don’t remember what the assignment was here, but I know I wrote it for a class. It could’ve been a really vague assignment like “write a 1500 word story with first-person dialogue.” I really don’t know. All I do know is that it was inspired by events going on at the time. 9/11 occurred just a few years before this was written, and we’d only been in Iraq for a year or two. One of my classmates that reviewed the story felt it was a completely unrealistic story, and I’m sure they are right. But cautionary tales aren’t supposed to be warm, fuzzy, and realistic. They’re supposed to be terrifying. It should also be noted that I wrote this years before the World War Z movie had zombies piling on top of each other to get over a wall, so the “human ramp” idea was my own. Not to say that the filmmakers took the idea from me, but I just want to be clear that I didn’t steal it from them.
I guess if I could pinpoint when this all started, it would have to be that Tuesday in September, at the turn of the millennium. Before that day everything was more-or-less normal. But then, religious extremism changed the world forever. Until that day, most Americans saw their nation as just, noble, and untouchable. I was just a teenager then, but I remember it well. Never before had the world witnessed terrorism on such a large scale. As it turns out, it was just the beginning.
Less than a heartbeat later, the United States had declared war on terrorism and had engaged the world in a great struggle. At first, the attention was focused on those who initiated and supported terrorism. After an unpredictably bloody war, it seemed that peace would finally take root. I’m sure it would’ve, eventually, had it not been for religious extremism.
We thought we had pounded the regimes into the desert, but really, we kicked up a sandstorm. An extremist Muslim minority, acting as though they understood the Koran better than Muhammad himself, declared a worldwide jihad to combat what they believed were overzealous Christians, exploiting the idea of jihad and using it to wage war on the “infidels.”
The complete story appears in the 2026 revised edition of Ten Terribly Terrific Tall Tales Trying to Trip the Triune, coming soon.
Ten short stories written across one year of creative writing classes in 2003, first published as a book in 2013. A revised 2026 edition is coming soon.
This was an assignment where I was supposed to read T. Coraghessan Boyle’s “The Hit Man” and rewrite it using any other profession. It is intended to be a humorous piece about the life of a drug dealer. Special thanks to Boyle for not suing me (yet) for “borrowing” the idea. Try not to take this piece too seriously. There are a lot of half-jokes and wordplay here that are supposed to mimic the original. It actually got a few good laughs when they read it in class. Maybe you'll laugh, too.
I originally started writing a story where the author torments the main character by putting him in various weird situations. I set it aside for a long time until I was told to write a metafiction story. I pulled out the sections that did not fit my new story and wrote the rest months later. This was actually enjoyable to do because it allowed me to do something with a piece that I have had a hard time finishing. There are so many things you can do with the seed idea that I just left it alone because it was so open-ended. This, however, is a relatively satisfying way to compress a book into a short story.
The assignment was to write from the perspective of someone who is wearing two different shoes and suddenly realizes it. They were supposed to think that everyone noticed and (I guess) freak out about it. My only fear with this story (besides how insufferably lame it is) is that someone might completely miss the irony. Dude, I swear I’m not, like, represented in that story. Like, you know, dude?
This is a short story about two men in the middle of the Iraq war from each person's perspective. One is American and the other is Iraqi. I messed up this assignment: it was supposed to have three perspectives, and I wrote it with two. Even that threw my creative writing class off. They were confused as to who was speaking. To compensate for that problem, I color-coded the text. But it took away from the point of the exercise. And we can’t expect people to print stories in color. That’s called a comic book. Anyway, I decided to keep the two speakers in two different fonts because I wanted it to be <i>immediately</i> obvious that there were two different narrators.
The assignment here was to “write the worst, horriblest story” I could. I’m sure it could’ve been worse, but I wanted to be somewhat readable. Though I’m sure I missed a few, I tried to break every rule I could think of, including (but not limited to) grammar, spelling, coherency, decency, and blasphemy. How many can <i>you</i> find?
