Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction

I’m thrilled to have what I consider my strongest flash story to date to be published in the journal of Nature this week. You can read the story on the web. You can also listen to it — they were also nice enough to podcast it (read very nicely by Kerri Smith).

I wrote “Rumination” in one hour-long sitting. I woke up very early in the morning, and my son Josh’s health was weighing heavily on me. He was five years old, and began experiencing some stomach problems. We had a strong suspicion that he was becoming gluten-intolerant, and were waiting to see a specialist in a few days.

Mind you, I have a number of friends who live with various degrees of gluten sensitivity. I certainly don’t mean to imply that such a diagnosis would in any way be equivalent to what the characters in this story are going through. However, it is not something I would wish on any five-year-old, and my dark mood helped produce a much more emotional story than I am normally capable of,

Josh’s stomach problems thankfully proved to be far less severe; he isn’t allergic/sensitive to anything so far, and I hope it remains that way. But the story went on to earn first place in a Codex anonymous flash-fiction contest among fifty-odd competitors, and went on to become my fourth story to be accepted and published at Nature — all with virtually no revision at all from that version written in the early winter morning this January.

Earlier this week I had another flash story — “Worldbuilding” — published at Daily Science Fiction. It was e-mailed to the subscribers and will go up on the web in a few days, and I’ll make another post about it then. Meanwhile, I’ll take this opportunity to remind folks that I am going to be doing a live reading of my humorous fiction at the Enigma Book Store this Saturday, along with two other funny writers: Russ Cochamiro and Aaron Rosenberg.  Details are posted here.