safe | fun | original
You’ll soon learn that Romance with a tragic twist is a favourite of mine. I experienced writer’s block with only one of my stories: For As Long As I Can’t Remember. So, I wrote a story about it! Glen has writer’s block with the same exact story and it takes a new friend of his to open his eyes and see what he’s been missing: her.
To start reading Writer’s Block, click HERE
Do you have a sibling that seems to have lived a different childhood than you by the way they describe it? Unfortunately, this can happen and not moving on with life and forgiving can lead to a lot of damage and regret. I wrote this story to attempt to bring healing to those who may have experienced this. This story is riddled with elements from my own childhood experiences.
Our character, Ash, has to make a journey into forgiveness, as a man, that we all need to. But for Ash, he’s a bit too late. Hopefully, we won’t be.
To read When I Was Younger, click HERE
This one was fun! The name came a little bit after I started writing.
This story literally started by me imagining the scene described when Carmine is on the beach and someone tries to steal from her. I imagined this woman who was way too confident and snipers lighting up the beach and her saying something about her daddy being protective.
I also wanted to explore the concept of doing a whole lot of wrong to accomplish a whole lot of right. And this story certainly explores that! It’s slowly becoming one of my favourites due to the action, espionage, and overall thrill.
It also allowed me to bridge a few other stories I was working on: Amber, Resurrection Man, To Serve and Defect, and finally Face to Face With Death Itself. All of which ask the same question: what kind of wrong is okay in order to do good. I’ll be compiling all five of these short stories into one compilation and will sell it online somewhere. Face to Face With Death Itself will exclusively be available through purchasing that compilation as it is far, far too dark for Green Leaf Writing.
To read The Godmother, click HERE
Where do I even begin with this one?
As a writer, this is one of my favourite stories. Not for the content or the writing style… but for the journey.
In about 2013 I set out to write a story inspired simply by the phrase: “for as long as I can’t remember.” I had never heard the phrase before, I had just thought of it one day and figured it’d make a fun amnesia story.
I randomly picked the year 1905 because I wanted to do an older story. I decided to have these two brothers, Harry and Mack (Mackenzie after my own middle name), travel across the US starting from the West Coast. I figured they’d end up in New York and eventually get stopped by the detective that was chasing them: Devante.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
And they did… I just couldn’t really figure out why or how but I knew they’d get stopped in New York. I wanted Harry to die and have Mack go to jail for murder. This would allow the narrator to write in his journal a frustrated memoir about how Harry will always be remembered as a criminal for as long as he couldn’t remember.
And then I started digging around in what happened in 1905 and discovered the tragic event that breathed life into this story. The very first elevated train derailment in recorded North American history. It happened on September 11th, 1905. This was obviously really intriguing due to the date. I kept digging and digging and found that 13 people died. But one of them couldn’t be identified. Harry?
For some reason, the motorman, Paul Kelly, decided to take a turn going three times the speed he should. We don’t know why. Perhaps because Devante paid him? And when the crash was through, Kelly ran off! Why? Perhaps because he had intentionally done this. They found Kelly two years later.
The tragic event filled all the gaps in my story. Did you know I had benched it for a long time because I couldn’t figure things out? This event made it all make sense. You’d almost guess I had known about the event before I began conceiving the story!
It took a long, long time to find all the names of those who perished in the crash. And I was thrilled when I did because I wanted to dedicate the story to them.
James Cooper: The Painter was originally James Conners: The Painter. I changed the name to Cooper after learning about a mid-forties man on the train who was beheaded. His name was James Cooper and he was a Painter. I’m not making this up! It seemed only right to rename my murder mystery character to James Cooper as the change was so subtle and meant a lot to me.
To read For As Long As I Can’t Remember, click HERE
This was a hard story to name! I wanted to call it coffee, court, and conflict… thankfully my wife deterred me from doing that! I had come up with the entire plot and concept and written the first scene prior to figuring out the title. It turned out to be perfect! This story follows two people whose love is a conflict of interest and also we get to see the conflict that comes from interest (being interested in someone)! This is a super fun story and I really fell in love with our two leads: Tavery and Hannah.
To read Conflict of Interest, click HERE
My best friend, Ben Ward (who moonlights as Michael Draw) shared a story he was working on about a Sci-Fi pair of kids on a junkyard planet working as slave-orphans for a Madame Zolan. One of the kids’ parents were killed by space pirates and almost immediately after reading about that my mind began racing. I knew it’d be so much fun to write a story about space pirates!
And it was/is! The best part… Nax. This is hands down one of my favourite characters. He’s spicy, witty, adventurous, and cockroach-like annoying: the crew can’t get rid of him! He’s got a secret that disappoints even me, though! I guess that’s the downside to letting my imagination write stories instead of my own will.
I am debating stretching this story into another series of stories. I’d use this as a back story for a whole realm of space piracy! But I may just cut it short (after the second episode) and leave the rest up for imagination. We’ll see.
To read A Space Pirate’s Life For Me, click HERE
Amber originally started with the concept of a kid-napping story I wanted to write. A man was to kidnap a girl at a young age and as she grew up, she was to begin believing he was her family. Thus, when the true parents found the girl… the girl wanted to stay with her kidnapper! This story was way too dark for my liking so I benched it.
One Fall Thursday morning, I was driving to work when the radio show I was listening to began talking about the Canada-wide alert system we have in place where Amber Alerts are texted to everyone in the country. The kid-napping story came back to me. I realized I still didn’t have one so I thought about it on the way to work and Amber was formed in that 25-minute drive.
I love the idea of a Liam Neeson’s Taken style female character who would do anything to get her daughter back, so when Heather’s character turned out to be exactly that, I was really pleased!
To begin reading Amber, click HERE
