Short Stories & Long Stories

It's not nice to put short stories in a box while allowing long stories to roam unchecked.

Short stories written with a focus on prefabricated rules is like force feeding creativity when creativity, by nature, is freedom. Write to convey a message and leave the fretting and vetting to the vacuumers. The ones who decide what's what and protect people from low page counts.

If there must be any hierarchy of honor at all, short stories are closer to the apex than long stories. Short stories require conciseness and preciseness in every paragraph, sentence and word. Short stories create maximum with minimum. Short stories train master storytellers.

It takes more than a few words to make a long story short.

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Why We Need Peach Trees & Kids

Buffalo Creek Crossing

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Barack Obama's Speech on Race in America

And then the wind came after a long, doubtful period. It started in constellations moved through the poles and across the hemispheres. Rain followed. Slow, unrelenting, promising rain. Unlike before it soaked into the fiber of folks. Perhaps it was their souls that drank deeply with a thick thirst for solutions.

Barack Obama's Speech on Race in America is one of the greatest speeches ever written. It blends history, intelligence, spirit, intuition, passion and leadership. It is brilliant and powerful. It saturates the senses and all we know in part and all we pray for. This is not the character of someone wanting the presidency for his own sake but to guide a desperately needed, democratic difference. Yet, this speech is about much more than race. It is about right and wrong. Things civilized and great societies master.

And the winds were the spirits of JFK, MLK, Mandela, Lincoln, Ghandi, Wells and those we never celebrate. They fight and defend freedom, equality and justice in any form just because of who they are and just because of us.

And the rains were truths sustaining life one drop and one difference at a time. Individual choices and single truths, though seemingly small, nurturing us all. Those who drank moved towards the horizon of hope and closer to each other.

Barack Obama has already been a blessing for this country. His character has defined him as a champion. Champions overcome personal challenges. Barack Obama has the qualities and capabilities to lead America back to the future the forefathers put forth in the Constitution and further back to the foundation of humanity.

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Believing in Belief

Life Sentences #2

America is like an airplane in trouble. Barack Obama is directing us to the emergency exit. Millions of passengers, believing their intelligence is worth more than the value of their lives are asking, “Do you have enough aviation experience and, by the way, what color is my parachute?”

The only thing they had more than me was belief.
[A reference to those who were already living their dreams from someone in search of satisfaction. She traded security and success and bought back the rest of her life.]

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Change Your Mind Sometimes

When an expectation is not met, something has to change. Change the entire expectation, change some variables, change yourself or change your mind.

Sometimes it's necessary to rethink our position and our actions despite how fervently we made them and how long we've held them or been doing them. The perfect example is God. The all-knowing reconsidered his position and his actions then changed his mind more than once.

God wanted to kill all the Hebrews except Moses. Moses beseeched God and God changed his mind and spared the Israelites. (Exodus 32:7-14)

After God told King Hezekiah he was about to die, King Hezekiah prayed and God allowed him to live 15 years longer. (Isaiah 38:1-6)

If God, the infallible, knows it makes good sense to have a change of mind sometimes, we'd better change our mind from time to time as well.

Changing our mind may be the best decision, no matter how long we've been in our jobs, relationships or held onto beliefs. Length of time doesn't necessarily make a decision right. There ain't no shame in anyone's game who's trying to change.

One of the greatest abilities we have is the ability to change our mind. It gives us the opportunity to remake, reorder, reinvent, recreate and reestablish our lives. Changing our mind sometimes changes everything.

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