A short story by Joslyn Chase

Here’s the teaser…

Locked inside the cold, metal walls of an abandoned warehouse, Homicide Detective, Adam Carson, wakes up on the wrong side of a gun.

In the course of a morning, his wife leaves him, an assailant abducts him, and the unknown person  behind the gun treats him to breakfast.

One that wreaks havoc on his digestive system.

The Carson Effect moves at breakneck speed through a story with very high stakes. Will Adam win the race against time and save what’s most important?

Read The Carson Effect today at Short Fiction Break online magazine.

Click here to see the ‘trailer.’

If you love the story, please cast your vote for The Carson Effect in the Reader’s Choice Awards.

Thank you so much! I really appreciate the help and support of my readers. You are a superlative bunch!

I thought I’d share some of my recent musings on the Power of Story.

Albert Einstein possessed one of the most inventive minds ever to grace the planet. He said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.  For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.”

Without imagination, there is no innovation.

How much, written as fiction and given birth to by the mind of a writer, has become fact over the course of time? Beneficial or destructive, it is a fact that imagination, formed and conceptualized into something comprehensible, is the forerunner of invention. Words and ideas are the spiritual blueprints of things to come. That makes them powerful, indeed.

Plato identified storytellers and poets as dangerous fellows

and proposed banning them from society. That’s because he recognized the power inherent in Story. In our world, stories are not forbidden. They come in every variety and we consume them in voracious quantities. Like anything else, they can be used to foster good or evil, and it lies within our free will, as individuals, to choose which stories we let in and which we ban from our own lives. These choices, though we may hardly notice them, have great impact on who we are and what we will become.

Sculpture at Dachau

My favorite kinds of stories—both to consume and produce—center around the underlying battle between good and evil. I believe such a battle defines the structure of our world, whether we’re aware of it, or not. Each day that passes, involves us in the battle and the choices we make move us deeper into one side—or the other.

Story has always been a powerful motivator and teacher.

Anthony De Mello, a priest and writer said:  “A lost coin is found by means of a candle; the deepest truth is found by means of a simple story.”

Have a simple story you’d like to share?

Or a comment about how Story has affected your life? Tell us about it!