 Short Stories: January 28, 2026 Issue [#13566] |
This week: Valentine's Day Romance Edited by: Legerdemain  
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Valentine's Day Romance
The holiday of love and romance is right around the corner. Merchants already have their shelves packed with the usual offerings of cute things, flowers and candies for you to give to a loved one.
Unfortunately, there's a flip side. The partner in a loveless marriage. A single person getting over a break-up. A widow missing their other half. While those are high-emotion energies, as an author, do we borrow into that? Do we use that sadness to leverage our plot and storyline?
I saw a post online about a Galentine's party. Women get together to enjoy each other's company instead of celebrating with a partner. People celebrate self-love, independence from forced romance or commercialism.
So perhaps this holiday, do something sweet like take a widow to lunch, or help your friend by giving a cockroach their ex's name. Or take your recently divorced friend to a smash event. This is a place where you get some gear on and smash stuff like plates, computer equipment, or perhaps your ex's favorite golf clubs. Just saying.
As an author, I merely suggest to look at the opposite of the norm. And Write On!
This month's question: What's your idea of anti-romance? Send in your answer below!  Editors love feedback! |
Excerpt: She never remembers the beginning clearly.
What she remembers is the middle. The quiet middle, when grief had stopped screaming and settled into her bones, when the world had gone strangely flat and she moved through it like a ghost no one noticed. That was when Richard became real.
Excerpt: As he was lying there, near the burning car, on the right side of the motorway after the accident, he was still gazing at the moon, hypnotized and paralysed. His thoughts were there again like many times before over the last thirty years, on the beach where he had last seen her. Many years had passed but this picture hadn’t faded at all; it was imprinted on his mind and in his eyes forever.
| |  | Happenstance (E)
She had her life mapped out in Faith; he lived as if tomorrow were a suggestion.
#2351253 by John  |
Excerpt: The 5:47 PM rush on the Red Line smelled of coffee, wool coats, and the faint tang of snow. Chicago in 2025 still clung to its subway system like an old friend, even as autonomous taxis glided soundlessly aboveground. C.J. Mallone leaned against the glass, a lukewarm coffee in hand. He'd loosened his tie halfway through his shift at the marketing firm and now studied the city's neon-reflected snowfall through the train's windows. Perfect, he thought. A life of small pleasures and no attachments.
Excerpt: I was nervous, apprehensive, yet a part of me was hopeful as my eyes looked out the window to find the carriage making its way up the dirt road to my ancestral estate. A woman was coming to the castle who I hoped would take the position of governess to my four-year-old daughter, Emily.
Excerpt: Two weeks before making the long trek into the metropolis, I was willing to take the risk, even though I knew the exposure to lethal gamma radiation was high and weighed heavily on my mind. But I desperately needed a couple supplies.
Excerpt: The world had turned to glass and bone. Twenty-four hours of screaming wind and relentless snow had sculpted Eleanor Vance’s small Vermont farm into a sterile, silent tomb. She stood at her kitchen window, a steaming mug of tea cradled in her hands, watching the dawn paint the drifts in cruel, glittering shades of pink. It was a beauty that stole your breath and then demanded your backbreaking labor in return.
Excerpt: Arlynn woke up. Her eyes opened to the pitch darkness in the room. It took her a moment to remember where she was and to adjust to the silence of the space.
Excerpt: Something touched my leg under the red, formica table. I jumped. I shifted in my seat, trying to make room for whoever it was who’d stretched out. But the foot, if that’s what it was, followed me. It slid up my ankle and along my shin. I glanced across the table to see who it was. Jason? No. I’d know if it was him. We’d kicked each other under the dinner table for years. Besides, this touch was too gentle for it to be his, too sensual.
Excerpt: The first thing Anna felt was the mini-submarine start to shake in the dark waters. Anna had been studying rock formations near the Lost City Hydrothermal site on the Mid Atlantic Atlantis Massif before the undersea quake rocked her sub. She turned to see Jack another geologist studying the sub's hydrophone with some alarm.
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This month's question: What's your idea of anti-romance? Send in your answer below! Editors love feedback!
Last month's "Short Stories Newsletter (December 31, 2025)" question: What do you yearn for?
Maddie Stone <2026 Edition>  : I yearn for balance and peace of mind.
You're not alone with the 'when did that happen?'. That helps me to know, so I hope it helps you, too.
Along with fatigue and being told it's because I'm getting old, I have realized - how did I get to where I have no life of my own to look to or speak about? How did I let myself lose me? I love my family and have no regrets about my support for them and helping them, but where am I?
Sometimes the fatigue is so great that I just can't even care that any of my own goals haven't been met or are nonexistent now. It's all I can do to just keep helping everyone else.
And please don't think that I am saying my family is horrible - they are most certainly not. They support me and encourage me to have my own stuff. It's a combination of outside needs and my own fault for not making myself a part of my priorities that has put me here, I know.
BUT. I am determined to see the value in having a life of my own again, even in just little ways.
Because hopefully, in the end, improving me will help me help them.
I wish you and yours the best of the New Year! And share my philosophy that laughter can reverse the aging process... it hasn't happened yet, but I'm having a great time trying to prove the theory. ;)
Elisa, Stik of Clubs  : Well, I have two themes for things I'd like to accomplish this year: delegate and diversify. I had too many ideas in my head to pursue, and I want to continue sharing discoveries from all sorts of places/creators. Nailing down the specifics is the tricky part.
Dave Ryan  : Being able to get past events in my youth. But I've been hoping for that for decades and, as my recent blog posts show, I don't think it''ll be happening this, or any other, year.
🌝 HuntersMoon  : A day without drama! Does anyone want to adopt a family? 
TheBusmanPoet  : My wife. 
Indelible Ink  : Health.
Tannus  : Peace in the Middle East. That is what President Carter wanted. However, he never got to see that happen. As for me, I want to do my job with no oversight, no paperwork, and no stress.
Conrad Moriarty : Peace, acceptance, abandonment to divine providence. It’s all gravy after that!
Joel : Solitude.
Friendly Neighborhood Derg  : Acceptance, both for who I am and what I strive to be (the friendly neighborhood derg for one).
jackson : Complete happiness for everyone.
keyisfake : More time to write and travel.
Thank you everyone, for responding with your heartfelt answers!
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