Artful Wobbler

When we check the clock we’re usually looking for what time it isn’t. We want to know if we’re late or early for whatever we do next. Often we won’t even...

How did I not see this before? I honestly thought hate is a poisonous emotion that harms both the hater and the hated. It never crossed my mind that for...

I learned a few things from what I did before and one is how people shut down in what seems like overwhelming odds. In the face of vastness how does one...

These two little stories mean a lot to me in different ways. The first is an open wound, the second is liberation though these two have nothing to do with...

My working definition of cowardice is letting myself or someone else down from fear of consequences to me or people I most care for. We all might want to...

And over here. Just alerting you to a change of Artful Wobbler from Substack to Buttondown. All else is the same but want to give you a heads up where I’m at...

Arriving late and leaving early

I don't usually do this, but...

The great Kathy Fish posted on Bluesky about flash (super short) fiction as its own entity, not a shorter short story and asked what its authors aim for. I love the question so much I wrote this

The Innocent robs us of willful blindness, so we bury them. Better dragons than this wide-eyed wonder latched to our hand telling us we don’t have to live this way.

They're already in a tree with rocks (or worse) pitched at them. What does it look like if the writer wrote to comfort and protect them and not just lob a few more grenades?

It’s not ideal to say I’m not really sure what this is yet. It’s still feeling its way into being, maybe it won’t ever really be at all. But I know it isn’t...

The messy art of disappearing

Which controls us, the heart or the mind? Which influences our behaviour, which can be appealed to when times get dark around us and our choices, our agency,...