Sometimes hope takes the form of a longing for things that could have been, a past that we cannot change, or the welcoming moment of the now that our heart knows will soon be lost but may one day come again.

Today, so many are convinced that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Well, yesterday too. Except the crises du jour have changed. What can that in itself tell us? When I was young the doom of mankind was the population explosion. One of the most influential books of the 20th Century was Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich’s “The Population Bomb.” Why didn’t it go off?

Following a story pattern or template is not the key to writing your best story, but it can be a disciplined way to focus your mind and learn some basics. Where many submissions show skill with words, a flair for dialog, and a passion for world building, they often fall apart when the story is assembled as a narrative structure on the page. Let’s bow and begin.

This Super Secret is on proactive vs. passive heroes. In many submissions from beginners, the protagonist is swept along by circumstance, passively reacting to events instead of exercising their will over events to change their circumstances. It’s a big problem among hopeful writers, often creating a weak internal character arc and failing to engage the reader!

Quantum physics raises fundamental questions about the nature of reality. Does it have anything to say about love?

Despite its size, Mustanen could tell that the Giant was still young. It must have gotten lost Giantside, must have inadvertently crossed the Boundary. To its kin, it must have inexplicably vanished. Knowing not what it had done, or how, it must have panicked, and in its panic sustained the injuries that drove its mad rampage.

The flash came again and again. In the middle of a busy street, at the bottom of a deep stairwell, and, most memorably, inside the tiger pen at the zoo. She tried to get to them each time, but she never wound up anywhere close by the time the flash disappeared. It left her all the more determined to get to the world beyond.

I wonder, shamefaced, if we need to exchange information of some kind, if they have to report this as an incident or if the tube bus does it automatically. They stare at each other for a minute. Maybe also at me. There’s no need, they say. You didn’t do anything wrong.

Everything around us began to move with extraordinary speed, like some switch governing all the known rules of physics had been turned off in the Universe. The skaters and the walls and the rink blurred and became little more than flashes of lights and colors, as though I were watching a film played at twice or triple the normal speed.

The burning under my skin shifts into prickling ambivalence. No longer painful because my nerves are deadening. Peach trees don’t have nerves. The counselor warned me that this transplantation would mean relinquishing my body. But I thought the annihilation of self would be mortifying. Instead—

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