ALISSA YARBROUGH

A "Super" Short Story (6 Min Read) Tasha has made a new man out of me. And I'd die to regret it. I exit the Bugatti under the radiance of a full moon and spring up the flagstone steps leading to the simple, even cottage-like house compared with the mansion I'd driven from. Modest yet elegant. All attributes drawn from the gentle hands managing the unpretentious property. The Japanese Maple, sprouting from the red garden mulch, is reviving from the state the previous owner had

Our society is a visually controlled one, saturated with cinema and flashy videos in order to maintain our shortening attention spans. I'm seeing the same drift in fiction, a molding of the writing to keep up with the dopamine in the action-packed movies. We are showing all right, but along the same vein, we're going overboard in describing every detail as we would see in a motion picture.

Birds Alive!, the first book in the Empty-nesters Cozy Mystery series by Jen Dodrill, is about a woman who finds herself an empty-nester once her youngest child has left for college. Somewhat listless and seeking to turn over a new leaf, she starts a bird-watching club and gets more excitement than she anticipated when the club's first outing involves the death of one of their members.

“Laissez les bons temps rouler.” “Say what?” The young woman broke from the view of the busy street and shielded her eyes to take in the man sprawled at the wrought-iron table. “It’s what the Louisiana French say: ‘Let the good times roll.” The Louisiana French had to have something there on this fair Spring day. ..

There is beauty in the arrangement of words, and while I understand in fiction you cannot bore the reader with an overabundance of descriptions and flowery phrases, there needs to be a balance between keeping the pace of the story while not altogether ditching eloquence for directness.