Category: Playing With Fire
It’s Bean Day! (and a MORGARTEN update)
Three or four times a year comes a holiday that makes me twitch like a four year-old lying in bed listening for the bells of Santa’s reindeer, and today is that day. Hallelujah! My shipment of green coffee beans has arrived! Yeah, I’m a coffee nerd. To anyone who’s read my short story Playing with Fire it’s no secret. I roast my own stuff at home and distribute it to a select group of family and friends. Often in late-night meetings from the trunk of my car. I started drinking coffee when I was 13. Horrid, canned crystals that had more in common with ground-up asphalt than the roasted pit of a coffee cherry. But it’s amazing what 2 heaping teaspoons of Coffee Mate (also known as “powdered death” in some circles) will do to a rancid cup of asphalt water. I drank it. I survived. And now I make up stories about the stuff. Well, actually only one so far. Most people’s reactions to Playing with Fire go something like this: “Uh, wow, JK. This is really…different…than…you know…your regular historical stuff.” I then shrug and say, “I’m a complicated man. I have sides.” At this point they usually...
read moreFree coffee roasting short story
Get Playing with Fire while it’s hot…and FREE This story is currently free on Amazon & Barnes & Noble but it will be going up to $0.99 soon. Could be today–I’m not sure when it will happen. I’m a “home-roaster” (that’s what coffee geeks who roast their own coffee beans at home call themselves), so this story was especially fun for me to write. I think a story comes alive when a writer uses a variety of senses to describe a scene or a setting. I took a look at my own writing and thought I was weak in the “smell” department. To most people, being weak in this area might not be a bad thing, but not for a writer! So I decided to write a story emphasizing the sense of smell, as a way to practice. This is what came out. Does it stink? You tell...
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