He is a man lost in the familiar: sometimes he wakes up in a life almost like his own, but not quite. It's almost his fault, too, in the sense that some version of him made this happen. And every time, there's one thing he hopes for. This is a spec-fic flash fiction piece inspired by an image.

In 2018, I put together a simple draw to challenge myself (and anyone else who wanted to try) with flash fiction prompts made up of three suits of cards, shuffled and drawn. The clubs denoted a genre, the diamonds were an object, and the hearts were a setting. Starting with January (A fairy tale, a tattoo machine, and a prison) and drawing once a month thereafter, over the course of a week with no more than 1,000 words, the idea was to write a flash fiction piece using those prompts. It let me stretch writerly muscles a bit (especially into genres where I don't often wander). Here are all twelve stories that came out of the Flash Fiction Draw Challenge.

Introduction: Would You Want to Know? This is How You Die: Hematoma This is How You Die: Murder This is How You Die: Under Collapsing Shelf This is How You Die: After Many Years, Stops Breathing, With a Smile on Face

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER -- In Cory Doctorow’s wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state. A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus’s hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It’s incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier. Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can’t admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He’s surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can’t even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He’s not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he’s gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do. Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they’re used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place.

The Freeze-Dried Groom is one of the nine stories in Margaret Atwood's fantastic new collection Stone Mattress. A collection of highly imaginative short pieces that speak to our times with deadly accuracy. Vintage Atwood creativity, intelligence, and humor: think Alias Grace. Margaret Atwood turns to short fiction for the first time since her 2006 collection, Moral Disorder, with nine tales of acute psychological insight and turbulent relationships bringing to mind her award-winning 1996 novel, Alias Grace. A recently widowed fantasy writer is guided through a stormy winter evening by the voice of her late husband in "Alphinland," the first of three loosely linked stories about the romantic geometries of a group of writers and artists. In "The Freeze-Dried Groom," a man who bids on an auctioned storage space has a surprise. In "Lusus Naturae," a woman born with a genetic abnormality is mistaken for a vampire. In "Torching the Dusties," an elderly lady with Charles Bonnet syndrome comes to terms with the little people she keeps seeing, while a newly formed populist group gathers to burn down her retirement residence. And in "Stone Mattress," a long-ago crime is avenged in the Arctic via a 1.9 billion-year-old stromatolite. In these nine tales, Margaret Atwood is at the top of her darkly humorous and seriously playful game.

A young boy, Adam, discovers a gold medallion in a lump of coal. He keeps it as a curious good luck piece for the next twenty years, until as a scientist, he discovers it contains a message and is clearly alien. Join Adam and his colleague, Linda, as they embark upon an adventure of revelation, ultimately giving up all they hold dear to discover who we are and who put us here.

THE BODY ELECTRIC IS A NEW, FULL-LENGTH SCI FI NOVEL BY BETH REVIS. THE FULL NOVEL IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE FROM ALL MAJOR RETAILERS. THIS SAMPLE COMPRISES ROUGHLY 1/3 OF THE TOTAL BOOK. The future world is at peace. Ella Shepherd has dedicated her life to using her unique gift-the ability to enter people's dreams and memories using technology developed by her mother-to help others relive their happy memories. But not all is at it seems. Ella starts seeing impossible things-images of her dead father, warnings of who she cannot trust. Her government recruits her to spy on a rebel group, using her ability to experience-and influence-the memories of traitors. But the leader of the rebels claims they used to be in love-even though Ella's never met him before in her life. Which can only mean one thing... Someone's altered her memory. Ella's gift is enough to overthrow a corrupt government or crush a growing rebel group. She is the key to stopping a war she didn't even know was happening. But if someone else has been inside Ella's head, she cannot trust her own memories, thoughts, or feelings. So who can she trust?

THANK YOU EVERYONE for reading this sample of Paper Hearts! Due to popular demand, I've turned this into an actual book, which you can buy from all major online retailers. AND it's actually three books: a volume on writing, one on publishing, and another on marketing. More information: bethrevis.com/books Buy the books signed: malaprops.com Buy the books online: http://astore.amazon.com/autbetrev-20