Where’d that come from?

Having been a voracious reader for all my life, there are two things I’ve always tried to bring along every time I open a book.

First, a suspension of disbelief. If you’re planning to be entertained and taken for an exciting ride, don’t bring along arguments of logic and physics to dispute the events taking place on the page.

Second, and more importantly, my imagination. As I read, I enjoy the “mind movie” that plays in my head, bringing the words on the page to a more vivid life.

For reasons I can’t explain, I found myself focused on those ideas yesterday, and how a writer can make something even more threatening, scarier by not showing it clearly. Each of us will imagine this thing based on our own experience, and on what scares us, so the ambiguity of the threat makes it all the more dangerous in the minds of each reader.

As I was considering these things, I found myself writing… writing fiction, for the first time in a couple years now! The bike was wobbly, and in dire need of a good tune-up, but it still worked, amazingly enough.

When I finished what became a Flash piece, I decided immediately that I wasn’t going to fall down the old rabbit hole and play the submission game with it. Nope, I think I’d rather put it here, so anyone who’s interested can have a quick read and see if their imagination makes things worse than the words on the screen imply.

For better or worse, here it is – Blackout