My story, 'Black Betty', is now live on Lone Star Stories. Fiction from Forrest Aguirre, Claude Lalumiere, and poetry from Pam McNew, Marcie Lynn Tentchoff, and Mikal Trimm are also there, so if you don't like me, you might like them.

What inspired me, originally, about this story, was a form that I saw used by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, in a piece called 'In A Bamboo Grove'. In it, Akutagawa uses a series of different narrators to talk about the murder of a woman, each of them with a conflicting version of what has happened. The story was adapted, years ago, by Akira Kurosawa for the film Rashomon, which is, actually, a title that Akutagawa used for a different story, and one that I think is a little more successful in its emotions at the end than the previous. It's also a lot more straight forward, however, and where's the fun in that? Anyhow: what interested me was the use of that broken up narrative device, and the different voices I could use, and the dramatic tension I could get out of what is, essentially, a series of monologues.

I wrote the story at the start of the year and, ten months later, I still like the way it came out, which is not always true for me. But, it's not like my opinion is worth anything on these matters. Go read it and tell me what you think.

Link.