I generally don't use writing prompts. I see the value in them but as far as I can remember, I've only used a writing prompt once. 

It was for "Homework Assignment #3," a story just published in The Militant Grammarian, and the prompt was: “Write something in which a place becomes a metaphor or is a locus of a specific emotion.”

Seems simple enough. But at the time I was given that prompt, I didn't want to write a simple straightforward story. I didn't want to write a serious story about a heavy emotion. 

I wanted to write something that would be more fun.

So I decided to write a dramatic monolog from the perspective of a college student in a writing workshop who is trying to explain to his writing professor why he's struggling to write a story using the same writing prompt. In the end, he does actually describe a room and the emotion it holds but only in an indirect way that allowed me to have some fun.

Along the way, the narrator describes seven different ideas along with the reasons he doesn't think they'd work. For me, part of the fun was that instead of coming up with just one room and one emotion, I had to come up with eight -- the seven that the narrator dismisses and the one room that he ultimately describes.

For example, one of ideas would require a flashback, and the narrator dismisses the overall concept because he knows -- has been told, as I have -- that flashbacks are much more complicated than you'd think, in part because they disrupt the narrative flow. So of course, I included a significant flashback in "Homework Assignment." 

The goal was that all the story concepts had to be different from each other, different characters, settings, etc. They couldn't be a variation of a theme or involve the same character or location. At the same time, they had to have a way to connect to the narrator, had to seem like concepts he could have devised, and had to help with the emotional payoff at the end. And I wanted many of them to have a humorous element, something to make it fun to write and to keep the reader's interest.

An added benefit for me was that when I looked at the stories-within-the-story, I decided some of them were worth writing as standalone stories. One of them, "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," recently received an honorable mention in the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. Another needs some polishing and I hope to start submitting soon. In the meantime, I'm working on two others.

Which is to say that "Homework Assignment #3" has spun off several stories I'm proud of, a pretty good payoff for one writing prompt.

I don't always remember when I get ideas for stories. But in the case of "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," I do remember where I got the idea. 

I'm interested what sparks story ideas because the process of finding a story-worthy scenario isn't science. It's not just inspiration from a muse. The source of a story may help me understand what I'm thinking about (as Joan Didion said, in her essay, "Why I Write") or what another writer, whose story I'm reading, is thinking. Not every story needs to make a point about society, of course. But if writers can write about any topic, it's worth looking at what motivates them, and what they're trying to say about the world they're depicting.

For "Shrine to the Cult of Joy," the goal was to write about a room that contained a lot of emotion; the scenario of a daughter and mother who have a complicated relationship came from a different story, "Homework Assignment #3," which has just been accepted for publication. 

In "Homework Assignment #3," a dramatic monolog, the narrator is a college student who tries to explain to his off-screen professor why he's been unable to fulfil the assignment of the assigned writer's prompt -- to write a story in which a room is a locus of emotion. In the course of that other story, the narrator describes several possible ideas that he tried and dismissed because he feels he couldn't write any of them. (The reason becomes apparent by the end of the story.)

After setting "Homework Assignment #3" aside, I figured a way to write the story that became "Shrine." As basic as it sounds, I started with a description of the room in order to set up the emotion the room holds for the daughter. That meant describing the contents of the main character's room as Gabby decides what to take with her to college, what to give away or trash, and what to leave behind. It was those details that help establish who Gabby is and what her relationship is to her mother. 

While I knew what the beginning had to describe, I had no idea what the middle of the story would entail, and only a partial sense of what final section should be. As details fleshed out the lives and disagreements between Gabby and her mother, I kept asking: how are these relevant, what don't I need to keep?

I had to figure the plot and raise the stakes while maintaining a focus on the room as a character itself. As with Gabby, the room changes over the several years covered in the story. It was interesting going from what I knew I had to describe in the first section to figuring out the path to the climax.

Part of the challenge for me is that while "Homework Assignment #3" and "Shrine to the Cult of Joy" are standalone stories -- they are not sequels, for example, because they have different types of narrators (first person and third person, close perspective) and involve different characters entirely, different settings (New York City and suburban Massachusetts), etc., I wanted to keep them connected. Since the scenario in "Shrine" originated in "Homework Assignment," I wanted to write "Shrine" as if the "Homework" narrator was the writer. "Shrine" had to be the story the "Homework" narrator could tell, the story that would interest him, with some of his obsessions, his interests. That is why there is a similarity in the description of Gabby and her mother and the love interest in "Homework" and her mother.

Along the way, I moved sections around, added new content, deleted unnecessary scenes. After a lot of work to make sure "Shrine" could stand on its own (instead of being a story-within-another-story), it won Honorable Mention in the 2023 Marblehead Literary Festival. 

My main point is that you have to trust and believe in your ideas. Often it takes longer to see them through completion -- at least for me -- but I'm pleased that my conviction in the story ultimately paid off. 

I don't always remember what sparked a humor piece or short story. In the case of "Snowbanks," I have a very clear memory.

A couple of years ago, a friend told me a story. Well, what I actually remembered, what stayed with me was the bare bones of an incident that he said he'd heard about that happened at his commuter rail station.

There might've been a newspaper article about it at the time. I seem to remember there was, that the incident was vaguely familiar when my friend told me about it. I tried looking for it recently, but I couldn't find it. I found plenty of other incidents near the two possible commuter rail stations but none that matched what's in "Snowbanks," none that interested me as much.

What my friend told me was an incident, something compelling but it was not a full story. 
​What I tried to do in "Snowbanks" was try to wrap a story around that incident. It was kind of like reverse engineering. I knew the ending but had to find a way to start from a beginning that would connect to the ending. 

In no way was I trying to tell the story of the actual person -- I have no memory if I ever knew the man's name, age, or job. If there was a newspaper article, it would not have mentioned anything about a family other than the name of a wife/partner/girlfriend or children, if any. Newspaper articles of this sort provide some details but don't flesh out the person's life. As I saw today in a New York Times book review of "The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece,": "knowing the facts is not the same as knowing the person." 

This is not a complaint about journalism. Newspaper articles have to convey facts but those facts, especially in articles about an accident, generally don't provide a sense of "knowing the person," especially in situations that can seem somewhat random.

So what I tried to do with "Snowbanks" was to develop a facts that would coalesce into a character who finds himself in a commuter rail station, an ordinary location that you might not even look at twice as you're driving by. 

So inspired by, not based on, true events, "Snowbanks" is an attempt to explain an otherwise random event, to find a way to make it make sense.

You can read the story in Bull Literary Magazine: ​http://mrbullbull.com/newbull/fiction/snowbanks/. 

Sometimes the bedtime stories we tell our kids take a life of their own.

When my kids were younger, the bedtime stories I told them were family origin stories: how my father's father, a Polish citizen, had been conscripted into the German army during World War I and how he escaped or how my father and more than 40 members of his family escaped Germany in 1933, for example, and how he eventually emigrated to the U.S.

They do love those stories but -- while I am very grateful, I don't have any similar personal stories. So I began telling them ghost stories, which they liked more than I expected. Ghost stories may seem an odd choice for when you're trying to get kids ready to sleep. 

But we lived near Salem, Mass. at the time, and ghost stories are kind of a lingua franca of the area. So I told my kids aa series of ghost stories involving two teenage best friends, Bob and Eddie.

After a while, I decided to write up the first of those stories into what became "Wooden Kayaks," which was published in Spaceports & Spidersilk Magazine.

I learned a couple of things in transferring an oral story to the printed word. The characters and plot elements remained the same but the way I introduced the characters, the settings and the narrative itself had to adopt for it to make sense for readers who are not my kids. I enjoyed the process, and was pleased when the editor, Marcie Tentchoff, described it as "A great traditional style ghost story, and I'll admit that I love the nautical theme." Which is what I had been aiming for when originally telling it to my kids: It's spooky without being scary, which was important since we lived a few blocks from the ocean. 

I knew this story was successful when elements appeared in a story my daughter wrote in elementary school. Since her version appeared in print before mine, she claims credit. But then I claim credit for the good grade she received. So perhaps we're even. 

It's been a while since I've posted while I've been working on short stories. I've started submitting them so we'll see.

But that isn't what's kept me up at night.

Of course, politics has kept me up. But I don't want to get into that.

So I asked my mother, a professional hypochondriac and a semi-pro insomniac for some sleep tips.
 
She wrote an article that was published in the "Funny Women" column at The Rumpus under the title: "Sleep Tips by a 90-Year-Old Insomniac." So there.

I'm proud of her. It's a charming piece. And the editor at The Rumpus was really supportive (I know because I served as liaison for the editing process since my 90-year-old mother isn't familiar with Google Drive, where the editor had posted changes to the article).

The thought of her getting published when I haven't written a humor piece in a while isn't what's keeping me up. Honest.

But I am publishing a blog post about her article and including her clip on my list because she doesn't have a website of her own, and it seemed like the best way to track her humor pieces, too. She's already at work on another piece.

More than 20 million Americans play Fantasy Baseball -- but for several years now, I've felt there's something wrong with the concept of Fantasy Baseball, in which participants pretend to be owners and manage a team comprised of real players. The point is to outscore the other teams in your league based on how the actual players do in real life.

The problem, I think, is that while participants get to imagine what it's like to manage a roster of players, the game of baseball remains the same. It takes a lot of effort to compete in Fantasy Baseball -- so much so that there a subscription-based websites dedicated not to Major League Baseball but to Fantasy Baseball statistics and articles just to give you insights to compete against people in your Fantasy Baseball League. While some leagues do pay the winner a nominal fee if your team comes in first, you could spend real money to compete in an imaginary league.

The problem, from my perspective, is if you're going to spend real money and put in a lot of time into Fantasy Baseball, you should, at a minimum, come up with some ideas to improve the game, ways to make what once was America's pastime more interesting and compelling.

So please check out my latest article, "Welcome to Fantasy Baseball 2019," that includes some of the following recommendations:

• Shorten the game: Fans have to get some sleep – not during the game – something not possible with games longer than “Lord of the Rings.” (Average length of an MLB game in 2017 was 3 hours 8 minutes; “Lord of the Rings III” runs 3 hours 20 minutes). Games will now stop after 2:45 hours regardless of the inning.
• Require Teams to Have Cooler Names and Logos: Are fans of the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox really rooting for an article of clothing? (How about something more relevant, like baseball caps? If not, how about spelling socks correctly?) Meanwhile the White Sox logo doesn’t even depict something that looks like a sock, so what’s the point?
• Update "Take Me Out to the Ball Game": Baseball loves its history but to appeal to younger fans, update the song to reflect what fans in the stands are really buying (it’s not peanuts and Cracker Jack). Might as well update the second to last line because no true fan feels that if the home team doesn’t win, “it’s a shame.”

There are other suggestions. Let me know if you have other suggestions to improve the game.

I don't often do sequels.

After the 2018 World Series, I wrote about how a Red Sox shirt I bought in Cooperstown, home of the Baseball Hall of Fame, helped the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Every fan likes to think they, along with their particular superstitions, help their team win. But I have proof: The Red Sox went 2-0 --  winning 100% -- of the World Series games when I wore the shirt. When I did not wear the shirt, they went 2-1, a significantly lower winner percentage.

Unfortunately, we live in a world in which there are doubters, claiming that the wins were the result of either:
A) Coincidence; or 
B) The team with the best regular-season record in the league doing their thing.

In other words, haters gonna hate.

So when the New England Patriots were set to play the Los Angeles Rams in 2018-19 Super Bowl, I decided to test out my lucky shirt.

As you can read in my article, "Shirt Tales Part II: How My Lucky Red Sox Shirt Helped the Patriots Win Super Bowl LIII," I put on the lucky Red Sox shirt when the Patriots needed us most, and the Patriots won the Super Bowl.

The shirt is now 3-0 in a World Championship series, particularly in games in which a Boston team plays a team from Los Angeles.

Two championships in a 100 days? That's not just a coincidence.

And the Patriots were not the best team during the NFL's regular season.

So what could be a driving factor in Boston teams' success in the two already-concluded professional sports season?

Clearly it's the shirt.

​I hope you enjoy the article.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, Boston's professional sports teams have won more than 11 championships: the Patriots have won 5 Super Bowls, the Red Sox 4 World Series, the Celtics 1 NB Championship and the Bruins 1 Stanley Cup.

That's a significant run of luck considering the Red Sox hadn't won a World Series in the 86 years before they "broke the curse" in 2004.

What brought about a culture of winning to Boston's teams -- boosting the sense of pride for New England and its die-hard fans?  

Ordinarily modesty would oblige me to not toot my own horn. But this is my blog, and no one else has editorial rights to the page so it is left to me to answer.

Until the prior decade, I lived in New York City. Then my wife and I moved to the Boston area, and well, I think the record shows for itself. New York teams -- even the Yankees -- have been in something of a slump (I'm sure there's a better word to describe the Mets and the Knicks) while Boston's teams have done exceptionally well, almost all of them consistently making it to the playoffs.

No doubt there are other factors, but my move to Boston is certainly one of them.

Same for my lucky Red Sox shirt, which I discovered accidentally. You can check out my article on GlossyNews.com.

A long time ago, in a city not very far away, I wrote a short story that involved physics and puns -- even though I had taken (and passed) only one physics course during college.

At this point, it's been so many years that I can't remember what inspired me to write the story, "It's All Relative at the Space-Time Cafe." But I wrote it, worked on it, revised every line several times, and showed it to a friend, my geekiest friend, whom I thought may be the only one I knew who might get the jokes and the scientific references. He liked it (he said) but thought the references might be too obscure. So I filed the story away, not thinking that perhaps my friend didn't like it as much as I did because he didn't get the references himself.

I dug the story out from time to time, and it always made me laugh -- which is not always the case once I see an article in print; sometimes, I see too many places I should have improved the piece with different word, pacing, punchline, etc. or could have improved it by deleting a joke. But this story always pleased me.

Finally, I revised it one more time, added a new section, and submitted the story -- and it got accepted. By one of the great science fiction magazines, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction! The story is available only through the magazine but you can read my interview with F&SF here.

That closes out a pretty good year...though I'm at work on a number of different humor articles and short stories at any one time. Here's to an even better 2016!

If science fiction, fantasy, mystery/thriller and other genres can have sequels, why not humor pieces? While editing a piece called "The Gods Must Be Rebranded," about how the Greek gods need to update their image so as to capture the imagination of today's generation for whom electronic devices hold more interest than immortal Greek deities, I came up with some jokes about Greek gods needing HR.

The HR-related jokes didn't fit into the rebranding article so I sat on the article a bit, then after a meeting that touched on some HR-related issues, I was able to come up with some additional jokes to round out the piece. I'm not saying it really is a sequel, and I'm not saying it was based on real people I know...

​But you can find the first article here, and check out "Confidential HR Memo of the Gods."

Now I've got to figure out if and how to finish the trilogy. Which is to say, I actually do think there could be a good office sitcom featuring the Greek gods.