By Tom Mairs

Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved

Preface    5

Work in Progress    7

Tanked    13

Revolution in the Park    17

Beans    19

A Question of Time    23

My My Mayan Stones    27

Samantha’s Flowers    35

Rock Bottom    38

This collection of short stories is actually more of a convenient accident than anything else. Every year I enter a writing contest where writers are supplied with a random genre and subject, then given one week to produce a 2500 word (or less) short story to match the assignment. Here is a word of note to the masses of non-writers out there - this is not as easy as it sounds.

In order to practice and prepare for this contest, I asked family and friends to pick random genres and subjects for me to work with. With the exception of “Work In Progress”, all of the stories in the collection were written as practice prior to the contest start date. All of them were written in less than 48 hours of writing time and all are less than 2500 words – bite size.

The first story, “Work in Progress” is an actual submission to the contest. The subject was “A Doll” and the genre was “Drama” which is ridiculously far outside my comfort zone of “Unlikely Hero” and “Science Fiction”. I surprised myself and was encouraged to put them all into one volume of work.

So here it is. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.