A peek into a few weeks of the disparate life in a small town, as it prepares for a holiday weekend. Fictional, flawed, facetious, fumbling, and fundamentally funny (hopefully). Hope this provides a bit of a change and some smiles. As always, my stories are complete before posting (contests excepted). So the chapters will be posted regularly.

An earlier version made the ONC 2025 Long List. This is the longer, revised version for the Wattys. Scott an insecure idealistic young man gets his girlfriend Zelda new virtual reality goggles that control one's senses and thoughts. The complete immersion in the MMORPG adventure cannot be distinguished from reality and raises the question will their love survive virtual realities with dream lovers and none of the inhibitions of actual reality. An exploration of ideas on love, sexuality, reality and the impact of future mind-altering technologies. Hopefully thought provoking and entertaining.

You and your three friends are having a great time trick or treating on Halloween, until you realize there are now five of you. Prompt taken from Halloween Vault 2022.

At age nine years, Emmeline witnesses, undetected, the brutal killings of her parents and the main man responsible. A child's promise over her parent's grave sites leads to a lifetime of tracking down the killers, carrying the vivid memories and feeding her quest for retribution.

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Small time thief meets partner, wealth ensues, troubles begin.

In the mid-latitudes the approaching winter has serious gardeners putting to bed their flower gardens. Often a shortage of space provokes the handing out of parts of well-loved treasures to other practitioners of the art. Some weirdness may surface in such encounters.

Satchmo Turner, erstwhile Private Detective, is looking for love. He's also looking for a missing photographer and some direction for his drifting life. Unfortunately, what he excels at finding is trouble, and when a canal boat-load of it hoves into view, Satchmo is going to need all of his wit and tenacity to emerge intact.

[Wattys 2021 Shortlisted] In the ancient French perfume capital of Grasse, lives bohemian recluse Cassandra Ducasse, the last remaining member of a legendary family of perfumers. Trapped by her past, Cassandra is unwilling to take up the reins of her family business. When she is forced into an unlikely working partnership with hotshot marketing executive Vince, the two could make the perfect team to create a hit fragrance for global superstar, Imogen. But can they put their differences aside for long enough to see that each holds the key to unlock the other's happiness. Featured by @Beauty, October 2021; @adultfiction, October 2021 Winner: Contemporary Romantics Award by @Contemporarylit 2022 Highest rankings (at different times) #1 in perfume # 1 in France # 1 in Provence # 1 in Riviera # 9 in womensfiction # 3 in familyhistory And for one brief, glorious, but likely flawed moment... #10 in romance.