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What inspires you? Please contact Sandy. |
InspirationAnything can inspire you.
I really like your author website. I'm honored to have my tree photo on the Inspiration page. That and Creativity are my favorite pages. I love that your suggestions apply regardless of your chosen media. |
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Check out Sandy's song, Free Fall, and her poem, The Old Iron Hinge
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This story was featured in the June 2023 Newsletter.
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A Car and Snow AdventureMy husband and I drove from Denver to Chicago in our new '72 Super Beetle in April. We got caught in a blizzard. Visibility: zero. Speed: barely above zero. I read the map to tell him how to turn the wheel (ex. 2 o'clock) in how many 10ths of a mile. We could tell semis were passing us by the noise. A gust of wind slid us sideways off the road. We heard sounds like explosions ahead of us. In a break in the wind, we saw a huge pileup of cars and trucks and the bottom of the exit ramp. We crept a few feet on the shoulder to the ramp and up as far as we could. A car facing the wrong way blocked our access to a crossroad in a rural area outside a city. We stayed in the car until we spotted a gas station in another break in the wind. I learned how early settlers could get lost walking from the We locked the car and held hands to keep from losing each other while we trudged through the deep snow and swirling bitter wind. The station had three heated bays for repair work. We spent the night sitting on tires, eating vending machine food, and drinking sample wines that a salesman paid a local snowmobiler to "rescue" from his damaged car along with the stranded people they were rescuing. Some truckers went out with the snowmobile club and brought in crates of oranges and apples for us. Later, the National Guard brought personnel carriers and took most of the people to an auditorium where they would have beds and hot food. We opted to stay in the garage—we got there early so we had tires. And wine. And no idea when they'd bring us back the next day. Our car wasn't damaged in the pileup. We could get on the road early. In the morning under a sunny sky, we reached our car. The other car was gone, but ours wouldn't start: the engine compartment was packed with snow. The wind even blew snow in through the seal around the back window. When we finally got the car started and the windows scraped and defrosted, we still couldn't drive away. The tires froze to the road. We'd befriended a college boy trying to get back to school at the end of Spring break. He pushed the car to help break it free and helped dig us out when we got stuck on the surface roads. Every underpass on the highway was clogged with incoming cars. To avoid the massive pile-ups under the bridges, we drove down the up ramps on the wrong side of the road and up the down ramps, crossing the grass separating the east- and west-bound lanes at the bottom and crossing on the bridges at the top. The only mishap was mine. My boots were in the trunk of the car. My husband pulled over to the side of the road to let me out. Why? Habit for a highway-engineer. My first step out of the car was a long one, down the embankment toward the ramp we'd just driven up. I stopped by hitting a rock with my ankle and climbed up. My husband and the hitchhiker linked hands to reach me and helped pull me up the slick almost-vertical last few feet. I settled in the back seat with snow boots and a swelling ankle. The hitchhiker got promoted to the front passenger seat. We dropped him off in Iowa and headed to my husband's family near Chicago. When we'd pushed the car to free the tires, the layer of frozen rubber had peeled off the tire and stayed on the road. The tires made thumping noises and small bumps for the rest of the trip. |
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Have you found any news stories that you'd like to share? |
Check the NewsAccording to KTVB News: "A Yellowstone employee found part of a foot in a shoe floating in a pool in the park Tuesday. An investigation is ongoing and part of the park was closed temporarily." If I wanted to write a crime story, this might inspire a great opening line. Feel free to click on the link to read more. |
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This story was featured in the July 2023 Newsletter.
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Depth PerceptionI watched a video of Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about time being the fourth dimension. Unlike the three dimensions of space (width, height, depth), we can't move around in time. But if we could, we could travel in time. I was born blind in my left eye. I have some peripheral vision, but I have no innate depth perception. In Junior High School, I had to make something for the Science Fair. I discovered optical illusions when I was in eighth grade. I faithfully reproduced them and explained why we see size differences of the same object with different backgrounds. Some backgrounds can fool us into believing a straight line is curved and make concentric circles look like spirals. Some can make us see the same object as different colors or size. The following year, my view of optical illusions focused on techniques artists use to make a two-dimensional surface (width and height) look three-dimensional. I didn't get great grades on my projects; no judges or teachers thought I did anything special. I didn't know why I was fascinated by these illusions, but when I learned to drive, I had knowledge that helped me cope with my lack of depth perception. Fast forward seven years. I married an engineering student who had a passion for racing cars. We bought a Triumph TR-3, and he raced it. We bought a real race car, and he raced it. I learned first aid, how to cut a driver out of a burning car, and worked corners. I staged race cars for entry on to the track and checked cars for problems that might cause accidents. But, I wanted to race, too. My husband taught me what he knew. We started with gymkhanas—racing one street-legal car at a time. He walked me around the track designated by orange pylons (traffic cones) in mostly-empty parking lots and abandoned landing strips. After each run in our TR-3, he suggested ways I could improve my time: cut the corner closer in turn two, start accelerating sooner coming out of the slalom, and go about fifteen feet deeper at the end of the straight before braking for the turn. Whoa! I couldn't see well enough to visualize fifteen feet. My brake point was a white rock on the right side of the track. “How much time is that?” My husband was an engineer. I could almost hear the gears turning in his head, or the slide rule sliding. “About three-quarters of a second.” My next run, I lined up with the white rock, counted “three quarters,” turned the wheel, and thought,“I'm going to die.” But I didn't die. I learned I could go a fractions of seconds farther than that. I don't see depth; I experience it. I thought I was the only one until I read Jimmy Buffett's autobiography. When someone asked him how far it was to fly from Key West to Miami, he told them he measured the time by the number of songs he could listen to on the flight. My world is defined by width, height, and time. Time is my third dimension because I lack the ability to perceive depth except by moving in it. That makes me wonder about your world, the world in which time is your fourth dimension. If you had the ability to move around in time, the way you do in space, would you have a fifth dimension? What |
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Dream Inspiration 1In my dream this morning, someone had replaced all the clothes in my closet with bustiers and butterfly skirts. I had on a slinky black dress, lots of silver jewelry and the only coat I could find was a hot-pink wool blazer. ???? In reality, my idea of dressing up is to wash my jeans and clean the dog poo off my clogs. What would a character who wore clothing from my dream be like? What kind of job would that character have? What kind of trouble would that character get into? Or, cause? What kind of goals, challenges, revelations would that character face? Check out Sandy's story Damn The Dream, and her poem, My Dream. |
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Dream Inspiration 2I put a slab of steak in front of the dragon. He raised his head and arched his eyebrows. "What do you want me to do with this?" "Breathe fire on it. You know: do what you do!" I fixed the rest of my meal. When I went back for my steak, I found the dragon with a full belly and sleepy eyes. "Where's my dinner?" He burped. "You told me to do what I do. So, I ate it."
Does the story need a setting? Is there more to this story? What would you do if this were your dream? Check out Sandy's story Damn The Dream, and her poem, My Dream. |
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This story was featured in the February 2023 Newsletter. If you want a microstory delivered to your email once a month,
Do you have a story that would work in the form of a list? |
Living the DreamI worked for a company that was downsizing. They offered a year’s salary to anyone willing to quit. A friend had the opportunity to buy back her horse ranch in the mountains from her ex-husband. She never had to put the worm on the hook. I wriggled onto the bank and climbed the line. Too late, I heard the old joke: How do you get a million dollars ranching? Start with five million. My childhood dream of living on a horse ranch in the mountains didn’t last. But I learned a lot.
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This story was featured in the August 2023 Newsletter. If you want a microstory delivered to your email once a month, I'm writing a memoir about my relationship with my father:
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My RockWhen I was a kid, eight or nine years old, Mom decided she wanted river rock in the flower beds. Mom was in charge of the house. Dad was in charge of the yard, and he grew flowers in the flower beds. But Mom prevailed, and we headed into into the mountains in our '57 two-door green Oldsmobile sedan. Dad turned from the paved highway onto smaller dirt roads, until he found a narrow two-track path next to a tree-lined creek. As my parents and older sister loaded smooth stones into the trunk, I wandered off. Downhill. And found the prettiest rock. It was rough and jagged, with bright colors, and looked like icing had drizzled down it and hardened. I fell in love with it, but I couldn't pick it up. I trotted uphill. By the time I got back, the back of the car barely cleared the high dirt center of the path, and my family was angry at me for wandering off. They had to wait for me, and I hadn't loaded any rocks. “I found a great rock, Daddy. Will you help me bring it up?” “No. If you want it, you get it up here.” I ran downhill and pushed the rock. By the time I reached the car, my arms, legs, and back ached, my fingers were scraped raw, and one toe throbbed from the rock slipping from my grip and landing on it. “Isn't it pretty?” “It isn't what your mother wants. If you want to keep it, put it in the car.” He pushed the lever that moved the back of his seat forward. I had to lift the rock into the car. I don't know how I did it; maybe the weight of stones in the trunk made the car low enough. I smashed another toe, scraped my knee, and balanced the rock on the door sill. One last push, and it rolled onto the floor in front of my seat. I climbed in and rode home with my feet on the rock and my knees up at eye level. When we got home, Dad stuck my rock in the front garden where everyone could see it. One of my sister's boyfriends told me what I'd found: a large chunk of petrified wood with a calcium liquid that had percolated through the rock and hardened into white crystals. He was surprised when I told him I'd found it in a creek bed in the mountains. I was surprised when he came back again and gave me a little rock collection in a small box. Decades later, I took those little rocks, plus some turquoise and garnets that I'd collected, to a jeweler. She made a necklace for me from those little stones. I still have it. When I married, the last item I took from my parents house was my chunk of petrified wood. My father tried to stop me. “Where are you going with that rock?” “You said if I wanted it, I had to get it up hill and into the car without help. I did. It's my rock.” I've hauled that eighteen-pound rock to eight houses. Now, it sits on the wall that borders the patio where I can see it from my kitchen window. |
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 photo ©S.L.Reay |
RavensA photograph of a parking lot on a rainy day. Two ravens are in the gravel and rocks above the concrete curb which is painted red with white letters: NO PARKING FIRE LANE. Above the F in FIRE LANE, a raven sits on a sign: No Rollerblading Or Skateboarding. Some might call this image foreboding or sad. The ravens amused me by flaunting the law to park on the gravel and the sign. Have you every taken a picture that tells a story? |
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This story was featured in the April 2023 Newsletter. If you want a short story delivered to your email once a month, |
Sunbathing and BatsThirty years ago, a friend invited me to a hot springs in in the mountains of southern Colorado on Memorial Day weekend. That was my first time in a natural hot springs, my first sweat lodge, and my first nude sun bath. My friend took the picture of me lying on a beach towel, reading. A co-worker once called me “a plant”—I thrive in sunlight. Dusk faded to black, and the invisible flyers disappeared. That night, I believed in magic and fell in love with bats. Ten years ago, I had my house covered with concrete board that looked like wood. The workers found a bat sleeping under the sun porch. I got home in time to keep them from hurting the little critter. Just past sunset, it flew away. The next morning, it was back with a friend. At dusk, they flew away: two bats swirling toward the gold fading clouds. Do you have a story about wild animals? |
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This story was featured in the November 2022 Newsletter. If you want a microstory delivered to your email once a month,
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The Car that Saved My LifeI bought this Ford Fiesta from a friend in August, 1982. It was a safe, economical, and reliable car for the entire time I owned it, with one exception. One winter night, I drove to that friend' house for dinner. When I left to go home, the car wouldn't start. We popped the hood, and saw no reason for the problem. I tried starting it again. No luck. We went into the house to get out of the cold, talked about potential causes (none likely, except—maybe—the cold) and symptoms I might have missed (none). "I'll give it one more try." The car started. I drove home via the divided highway that ran from Boulder to northwest Denver. When I topped the hill and looked toward Broomfield, I saw a flash of light and heard a loud explosion. By the time I reached Broomfield, the police had the southbound lanes closed and rerouted us onto surface streets with no explanation. It took longer to get home. I found a message on my answering machine from my friend. "Are you okay? Call me as soon as you get this." I did. He told me about the explosion: two trains hit head-on under the bridges that carried the highway across the railroad tracks. Both bridges burned. We did the math. If my car had started when I wanted to leave, I would have been on the eastbound bridge when the trains collided. I drove that car everywhere for several more years. It never failed to start again. |
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This story was featured in the December 2022 Newsletter. If you want a short story delivered to your email once a month, |
The Christmas MouseI dated a man who ran a shopping mall. Friday after Thanksgiving, he brought Santa into the mall on an antique fire truck. I dressed in a mouse costume I'd made from a remnant of fake fur, a long-sleeve shirt, tights, black shoes, and eye-liner nose and whiskers. A Santa hat made me a Christmas mouse, and I rode in the fire ruck—wearing a heavy winter coat because it was cold outside. I left the truck when Santa did, hid my coat, and handed out candy canes from a red and white stocking to the little kids. I posed for pictures and apologized to the parents of one child who screamed uncontrollably at the sight of a 5'6” mouse and had to be taken home. Children and their parents followed me from business to business where I asked for jeans that would fit over my tail and tried on hats that did not fit over my mouse ears. I asked for mouse food in the pet store and ran away from the cats in cages, shrieking “Eek. A cat.” The sales clerks played along. My friend asked me to go into a sporting goods store where a player from the Denver Broncos was signing autographs. On my way to the store, DJs from the local rock station yelled, “Hey, Miss Mouse.” “C'mon over here.” I did. That was my mistake. They had microphones and speakers up on stands, and shoved a microphone in my face. “Hello, Miss Mouse. What are you doing tonight?” In my best mouse voice, I squeaked, “Trying on hats and jeans.” They smiled and laughed. “Where are you going?” “To find the bronco.” They talked about the football player and the store, and shoppers headed down the mall. I started to leave, and they stopped me. “Why are you looking for the Bronco?” That was their mistake. “Because I wanna go for a pony ride.” The microphone vanished, one DJ hit switches, and the other hissed at me. “You can't say that on AM radio!” |
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The Crab Apple in a Cherry Tree by Rona Golfen, RonaPhotoWe had a Japanese cherry tree in our yard for many years, but it died several years ago. A neighbor cut it down, but left about 3' of trunk standing. I was going to have it cut down, but last year something started growing out of the top of it. This year we actually have a little crabapple tree complete with white blossoms. It looks pretty strange growing out of a dead cherry tree, but it seems to be thriving. It's so interesting to me that a crabapple tree can grow out of a cherry tree. So far the crabapple tree has what looks to be cherry tree bark. I don't understand how that works. I showed it to our rep from the company that takes care of our trees, and he said it might change over time. |
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This story was featured in the January 2023 Newsletter. If you want a short story delivered to your email once a month, I take a book with me when I know I’ll have to wait somewhere, like a doctor’s office, the car repair shop, or an airport. I have a to-read shelf that’s full of thrift-store finds and new books: secrets to uncover. Funny how that photo of little me with a book foretold the reader I would become. Do you want to share your story of how you started reading? |
The Little Girl with a BookI found a photograph of me when I cleaned out my parents' house. I couldn't have been more than two or three years old. I don’t remember the dress or know what hill I’m standing on. I'm holding an old hardback book, not a thin one with pictures, but I have no idea what book or why I'm holding it. I wasn't an early reader like my older sister—she learned when she was four and sick. Mom sat by her bed and read to her, day after day. Once, when I wasn't much older than I look in that picture, the lights went out and the skies grew dark. The wind blew over a huge tree that crushed the front porch of the house across the street. It howled and shook our house. Daddy called it a hurricane. I asked my mother to read to me. She told me to ask my sister. My sister sat close to the window, reading in what little light leaked through the rain-soaked glass. I begged her to read to me and sat close to her—as close as she would let me. Mom took me to the library to find books. Dad took us to thrift stores. I prowled the dusty shelves of worn hard-back books and studied the faded colored pictures on the covers to pick out what I wanted to read. Twice a year, my sister and I got gifts. We told our parents what we wanted. They bought one thing that was similar to what we asked for (within our budget) and something we needed. Sometimes, Mom slipped in a used book (a thrift-store find or hand-me-down). The first year my sister went to college, Mom gave me two new paperback biographies: Jenny Churchill and Isadora Duncan. The covers were bright and shiny, the pages smelled like ink and adventure, and the spines had no vertical age lines. I was the first person to open those books. |
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Do you want to know what's happening with this story? |
The Sinister Umbrella #1In Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (translated by Edith Grossman) called an umbrella “sinister.” What would make an umbrella look sinister? Later in the book, he wrote, “with his sinister appearance and his vampire’s umbrella.” Mystery solved. A vampire umbrella is intriguing, too—more than an umbrella for a vampire. A black umbrella with two broken spines like bat wings, and old-age holes, two revealing moonlight reflections like malevolent eyes. Now that I have the visual image, I need to decide what to do with it. Is it literal? Does it turn into a bat at night? That's too easy. |
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Do you want to know what's happening with this story? |
The Sinister Umbrella #2Last month I wrote "Does it turn into a bat at night? That's too easy." I surprised myself. I started writing the story, and realized that it needed something to add more tension: the umbrella that may or may not turn into a bat. It looks like one, and flies away, after years of clinging to a rusty table in the back of a courtyard. After that, it becomes a channel for power. Evil power. I have mixed feelings about this. I like bats. One took shelter under my sunporch, and I had to protect it from the workmen who were putting siding on my house. (See Sunbathing and Bats) So, I rationalize. It is not a bat. It is an old umbrella with evil powers that only looks like a bat. when tiny lights shine through two holes in the fabric. Is an evil umbrella that might look like a bat under certain circumstances a symbol of evil power? |
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The Sinister Umbrella #3I played Sudoku to shut out the voices in my head, but a male voice interrupted me. "Penitentiary boxes." I'm used to my characters talking to me. This voice didn't belong to any of my characters. And it didn't use words from any of the songs that live in my head. I tried napping, but the voice woke me again and again. "Manitoba" (or something like it) and other syllables that may have been other names or languages. What should I do with "penitentiary boxes?" I Googled it: solitary confinement cells, grim prison cells, cell blocks, and dogs sniffing cardboard boxes. I'm going to put "penitentiary box" into the The Sinister Umbrella. |
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Have you ever found anything unusual in a used book? |
The Old Traffic TicketI love old books, used books, with dog-eared corners, flexible spines, loose pages, hand-written notes and highlighted phrases. The books tell a story before you read the title. Old books contain memories, sometimes in a physical form. I found papers and old photographs used as book markers. One book I found contained an old boarding pass. Before paperless tickets, these passes were issued at the check-in counter and collected at the gate. Someone went to the airport, checked in, but used the pass as a book mark. Perhaps the traveler got sick, fell asleep and missed the flight, or left the airport for some reason. I wonder if I can turn a guess into a mystery story. What if that someone was a criminal, or unjustly accused of a crime, and that boarding pass was proof of their guilt or innocence? What if the person who found that boarding pass knew about the crime, and came forward? Or failed to come forward? Fortunately, Google found no evidence of a crime involving the person on that boarding pass. I still wondered what happened? Sudden illness? A frantic phone call from a loved one? An accident, or a missed flight? I once dozed off in the airport in Naples Italy, and slept through the boarding announcements, which were in Italian. I'm lucky I woke up and noticed the lack of people waiting to board. This traffic ticket is dated Oct 1, 1998. Tickets like this are common. Like boarding passes, they're turned in when the recipient pays the fine or fights the ticket. Twenty-three year old tickets are not common. Why was this ticket in the book for that long? The book looked like it had never been read. Did the recipient of the ticket hide it i a book? Did her heirs load up boxes of books and take them to the used book store? What else did they miss in her books? |
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This story was featured in the March 2023 Newsletter. If you want a microstory delivered to your email once a month,
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Two Career FailuresWhen I was in my 20s (1970s), I worked as a draftsman. A secretary and I were the only women in the building. She wore silver-hair sprayed into short stiff curls, starched dresses with floral prints, and long-sleeved matching sweaters like capes. I wore jeans, cotton-knit shirts, and tennis shoes. My drafting table was in the office at the other end of the hall. The geologists assigned to the other desks in the room spent their days out in the field, writing in notebooks, collecting data for me to draw. One day, Charles, a man from another office, shuffled into my office holding a camera. Remember Tim Conway's old man on the Carol Burnett show? That was Charles speeded up. I stopped drawing and put my chin in my hand, waiting for him to speak. “Do something sexy.” Sexy? Me? Oh, he was serious. I licked my lips. He snapped a few pictures. I went back to drawing pictures of core samples at different elevations. A few months later, Charles shuffled in with a trophy. “We won first prize.” He handed me the picture. “For that?!?” I think I yelped. “Yes.” He smiled and held up the trophy with a camera and “First Prize” in big letters. I put the photo down, and he let me hold the trophy. It had “Humor division” in small letters. My career as a model ended. One of our projects was collecting data about water levels in a canyon near a ski area. My boss gave me access to our computer and a book about how to use the writing/editing program—it was nothing like Word. I took the user manual home and read it cover to cover. I became the resident editor expert. I'd taken two night classes in computer programming: Basic, then Fortran. Some of my drafting work was repetitive: vertical rectangles divided into smaller boxes. With help from one of the computer experts, I wrote a Fortran program to draft the boxes. It lacked all the details I drew, but it was a start. With less than two hours of data entry, I could run my program and see the results on the monitor. Because we rented time on a computer in a different city, I had to wait one work day to have the printed results delivered—about the same amount of time it would take me to draft one page. If I refined my program, I could have it create a more complex design in far less data-entry time and improve productivity. Excited about this breakthrough, I showed my boss. “It'll never catch on.” He took away my user id. I took another night class. My career as a draftsman ended when I found a job as a programmer. |
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What's your reaction to this picture? |
Writing Prompt #1One of the writing groups I follow online posted this picture with a post encouraging us to write a a microflash story (at least 25 words). This is what I wrote:
Does this tell a whole story (in 55 words)? Or, does this read like an opening for a "real" story?
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Sandy Reay Author
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