Welcome to the second Flash Fiction Friday and the second piece of flash fiction in this new weekly series. Last week’s was a story entitled ‘Green’ by JD Mader. Tonight’s is ‘Captain Jack’s Cave’ by crime novelist Neil L Yuzuk…
The Crooked Corsair’s Cave looked as good a place as any to get out of the heat and fierce tropical sun. I opened the door, stepped in and waited for my eyes to adjust to the dark cave-like interior. The aroma of food made my mouth water and snatches of gay conversation filled the air. One gruff voice dominated, “C’mon matey and shut the door, you’re letting the hot air in.”
I sensed someone near and a woman’s arm took mine, “Come in and I’ll guide ye to a table. Captain Jack’s about to fill the air in here with some bullshit story about his pirate days and ye don’t wantta miss it. Jack,” she shouted, “Jack let me get this one seated and ordered and then ye can start.”
“Quickly lass, the day’s growin’ old.”
As we walked I began to make out the interior. It looked like a Disney Pirates of the Caribbean set, but the furnishings here were heavily weathered. A large dark-skinned man dressed as a pirate sat comfortably in a captain’s chair on a small stage, his peg leg resting on a stool and a schooner of beer was within easy reach. A parrot perched on a stand behind him.
“Here ye be, sir,” she said as we approached what looked like the last empty table – lucky me. I sat and almost laughed out loud at the theatrics. But I was on vacation, so what the heck.
“And what would ye be having to drink?”
I looked at my companion, who was dressed as a pirate wench with a low-scooped top that hinted at pleasures to be revealed. Her clear café au lait complexion was matched with a saucy grin and dark eyes that examined me as frankly as my blue ones did her.
“Your best rum with ice, and,” I looked at the chalked menu on the wall, “the grilled snapper with a small mixed salad.”
“That’s a good choice, the snapper’s fresh caught,” she said with that same smile. I looked at even white teeth, pink lips and real eyebrows – no makeup, all natural. Not the usual woman I would meet in the city. She tossed her long and wavy honey-gold hair at my examination as if to say, ‘Like what you see?’ Instead I heard, “I’ll have your drink right away.” She turned and with a swish of her hips she hurried away leaving behind the aroma of her perfume, musk—my favorite. She was back quickly with my drink. I took her wrist and asked, “And what be your name, saucy wench?”
“Never ye mind . . . and ye best watch your manners in front of Captain Jack. He doesn’t like his wenches to be pestered.” She slapped softly at my hand, I held on.
“Daniella lass, can we get started?” Jack called from the stage.
“Soon as me bucko unhands me.”
I released her wrist and said, “Miss Daniella, we’ll talk later.”
She smiled and bustled away. I had to have her, she was going to be mine. The parrot began to squawk, “Oyez, Oyez,” and Jack started his pirate tale, but I wasn’t listening as I stalked her with my eyes. Occasionally I saw her looking at me. I sensed her hunger, but mine was greater. I needed to feed.
It was later that night, after we’d made love, I looked down at her resting my weight on my forearms as I cupped the face that had captivated me between my hands. I turned her so I could see the left side of her neck; I leaned forward and pressed my lips to the spot that was warmed by the flow of blood through her carotid artery. I touched it with the tip of my tongue and gave her a tiny nip with my teeth.
“Oh now, is that the way ye roll?’
“Yes.”
With unexpected strength she flipped me and I was on the bottom looking up.
“And this be how I roll,” she said with a fanged grin and she leaned forward.
“That’s just what I was hoping for,” I replied as I reached for her with my own fangs.
We fed on each other that night and have hunted together, ever since the day we met in Captain Jack’s Crooked Corsair’s Cave.
I asked Neil what had prompted this piece and he said…
The inspiration behind “Captain Jack’s Cave?” hmm . . . I was in Washington, D.C. and a LI site was having a short story contest. The story needed a pirate, a cave and it had to be under 700 words. Ergo, “Captain Jack’s Cave” was born. I tried to give it a modern twist rather than doing a version of the Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s a variation of another short story I once wrote in the YA genre. It didn’t win, but it was fun to write. Morgen likes it, so that makes it a winner. Enjoy!
I do. Thank you Neil.
Neil L. Yuzuk was born in Brooklyn, New York. Now retired after twenty-two years, as a SPARK Substance Abuse Prevention Counselor, he wrote Beachside PD: The Reluctant Knight, after collaborating with his police officer son on a screenplay of the same name. The book was a finalist in the Global eBook Awards in the category of suspense / thriller.
The second book in the series, Beachside PD: The Gypsy Hunter is in pre-publishing, and will be available in December, 2011.
He’s working on the third book in the series, entitled Beachside PD: Undercover, as well as a screenplay: Fade To Light. Another book, Zaragossa: Fruit of the Vine is also in the works.
Neil’s co-author son, David A. Yuzuk was born in Brooklyn, NY and has been working in law enforcement for the past 14 years in southern Florida. He is also working on a prequel to the Beachside PD series called, Beachside PD: Cities of Sand and Stone.
David is the author of a soon to be released children’s book entitled, “The Legend of the Smiling Chihuahua.” He says “It’s my hope to create something positive and uplifting with my little story. If it can inspire children of all ages to follow their dreams, then who knows how beautiful this world can be.”
Let me know how you go David. 
If you’d like to submit your 1,000-word max. stories for consideration for Flash Fiction Friday take a look here.
Jim: I’m a married father of four, born and raised on Long Island, New York. I received a Bachelor and MBA in business. As I finished my MBA program, I was encouraged by a few of my professors who thought I wrote well. Upon graduation, the company I worked for had a large lay-off and I was caught up in it.
Helen Hunt writes short stories and features for magazines. Her short stories have appeared in Woman’s Weekly, My Weekly, The Weekly News, People’s Friend and Take A Break Fiction Feast in the UK, and That’s Life Fast Fiction in Australia. She also writes articles for Writers’ Forum and Writing Magazine. Helen is also a contributor to the ‘
Anne: I always loved books and reading. I majored in English in college and spent many happy hours in public and college libraries and book stores. My first job after college was as correspondent for an area newspaper. Although I tried to uncover interesting news, I sometimes fell back on writing pieces like “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith called on Mr. and Mrs. George Jones last Sunday.” I married, had six children and lucked into my perfect job as high school librarian and yearbook adviser for the rapidly growing Queensbury School District in upstate New York.
Anne: I’d like to start with the second half of the question, since nothing will ever top the experiences I had with the publication of An Affinity For Murder, the first book in my Lake George Mystery Series. In the late ’90’s I took a writing workshop from Saratoga Springs NY writer, Matt Witten, author of Breakfast at Madeline’s and other books in his Jakob Burns Mystery Series. An outstanding teacher, Matt urged me to submit the first 50 pages of An Affinity For Murder to the Malice Domestic organization which offered an Unpublished Writers’ Grant to aspiring mystery writers, a grant Matt himself had won a few years earlier. Long story short: To my amazement, I won the grant. An agent called and asked to represent me. I didn’t realize how unbelievable that was and put him off until his third phone call before I agreed. He tried to place the book with New York publishers, but had no luck. At this point, Matt had moved his young family to California and wrote for TV shows like Law and Order and Poltergeist. When he heard about the Dark Oak contest offered by Oak Tree Press, he urged me to apply. Again, to my surprise, I won publication of my mystery, along with Wendy Howell Mills, the talented young author of Callie and the Dealer and a Dog Named Jake. I’ve posted about this on the OTPBlog, August 1, 2011 (To find it, click on the latest post listed and scroll back).
Since that time, I’ve written four more Lake George Mysteries. In addition to An Affinity For Murder, c’01, ISBN 1892343-16-9, they are Beneath The Surface, c’05, ISBN 1-59133-124-2; Best Laid Plans, c’06, ISBN 1-59133-170-6 and 978-159133-170-4; Secrets Dark and Deep, c’07, ISBN 1-59133-198-6; and Cold Winter Nights, c’09, ISBN 1-59133-298-2, 978-1-59133-298-5, these last four published by Hilliard and Harris.
Anne: All five of my Lake George Mysteries are on Amazon, both in print and on Kindle and, I think, on Nook. I love the idea that I can read them on my Kindle. My goal now is to get them accepted for audio books, since listening to books on tape meant the world to my mother as her sight failed. Also, I love to listen to audio books myself on long trips except I was once so caught up in one written by a favorite author, I missed my thruway exit.
What is your opinion of writer’s block? Do you ever suffer from it? If so, how do you ‘cure’ it?
The twenty-second special episode of the Bailey’s Writing Tips podcast was released on 30th May 2011 and featured the third day of five as a volunteer at Oundle Literature Festival here in Northamptonshire, England. The content has never been released other than website links (on my 
Born and raised in Texas, but moved north to become an official ‘Yankee’ for the past 24 years – Gregory G. Allen has had short stories and poetry published in over half a dozen journals including Loch Raven Review and Off the Rocks 14. He is a blog and article contributor to several websites and has written over ten musicals that he has served as book writer and/or composer/lyricists produced for the stage. Proud Pants: An Unconventional Memoir about the life of his older brother’s fight with addiction and eventual death is available digitally and has garnered many wonderful reviews for Allen’s nontraditional way of telling a story through the mind of his dying brother. Allen has been in the entertainment business for over twenty years as an actor, director, writer, and producer and studied at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy and as a composer in the BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. He’s been the recipient of musical grants from BMI, ASCAP and the Watershed Foundation, and his musical River Divine won a Best Score award in New York’s TheatreWeek magazine back in the 90s. He spent six years as the Artistic Director of a theatre company in New Jersey and currently manages an arts center on a college campus.
I have always loved to write since I was a child. I used to write stories and plays and direct the neighborhood kids in my original works. Who knew that would lead to a career in the arts so many years later? I love to write stories that have some sort of twist or do not give the reader (or audience for stage shows) what they expect. These are also the types of creative arts I’m drawn to. When Hollywood decides to change the ending of a movie to ‘please’ the audience, I always wince wishing they would allow the piece to be seen in the manner it was intended by the writers / directors. I think its part of the reason I do not want to be considered a certain genre writer that must write in any type of formula. My short story pieces have all been of different genres and even my longer stories have done the same. Proud Pants was a non-fiction memoir that I wrote about my brother. They are his stories, but I’m putting the words/thoughts into his mind in my attempt to make sense of his life. My novel Well with My Soul out in October, 2011 is a novel dealing with family dynamics, addiction, religion and sexuality. And the story does not necessarily go where most readers will think it is leading them. My stage musical, Invisible Fences, was a piece that dealt with racial tensions in the 1960s and included a bi-racial love story that was considered very taboo in the U.S. South during that time. My novel Patchwork of Me (that will be out in 2012) allows me to get into the women’s literature genre writing in the first person voice of a female protagonist with drips of a mystery thrown in.
Tom: I began writing when I was quite young — I have a vivid memory of my first grade teacher, Mrs. Koyamatsu, walking across the playground with me and several other kids, telling me “Tom, you have a very vivid imagination. You should be a writer.” I don’t know what I’d said that prompted her to say that, but the suggestion really resonated in my underripe young head. I started writing my own versions of “The Hardy Boys” mysteries in longhand at my dad’s desk, and basically never stopped thinking of myself as a writer. Another thing that made the idea attractive to me is that ever since I was very young, I’ve been a stutterer. The idea of being able to sit down and write out what I was thinking was a great deal more to my liking than, say, improv comedy, y’know?
Tom: In 1988 I had a book out called “The Proving”, which was published by Doubleday. Oddly enough, since the rights have reverted to me, I’ve just finished getting it set up myself on Smashwords as an eBook.
Tom: I’ve got a 
If there is anything a writer fears more than a crashed hard drive, it’s writer’s block. The terror of one day sitting down, poising our fingers over the keyboard, and nothing coming out is enough to send most writers back to bed.
Smoky Trudeau Zeidel
Franki: I started writing poetry in my early teens in my sleep. By my late teens I had transitioned to writing while awake. That led to writing short stories, and of course, writing down my dreams in a journal. Eventually, I realized I had enough material to write a novel using actual events mixed with all the fiction, and Deception Past was born. Then, as therapy for dealing with a sudden disability retirement, I wrote Dragonfly Dreams. Now I’m hooked, because it’s so much fun.
Franki: Dragonfly Dreams is available as an eBook. The demand has changed so fast in recent years, I wasn’t even aware of eBooks when Deception Past was published, and it wasn’t an option when Ripples on the Surface was published. I hope someday to remedy both, and my next novel and collection of poetry will definitely be available as eBooks. I believe I’ve sold more eBooks for Dragonfly Dreams than printed copies.
Franki: I take characteristics from a few different people I’ve known and mix them together into one character. And of course, all of my characters have some of me in them. In Deception Past, the main character’s name is explained early on. Its symbolism ties her to the friend that “stole” her past life identity. In Dragonfly Dreams, all the characters have names related to their symbolic animal natures. I believe their all too common human flaws make them believable.
Morgen: My goodness… er, OK, poetry – sadly not. I like easy-to-understand and comic poetry but tend to read novellas, anthologies or novels which leaves little (no) time for any other reading. I have some Pam Ayres audio CDs which are fun. I’ve never read a reincarnation novel but have a friend who does (I think) and enjoys them (I think)… sorry very vague. Yes, printed books are selling here but not as many as eBooks apparently and bookshops are in trouble here – Waterstone’s is pretty much all we’ve got left especially as the supermarkets like Tesco and Asda (whose books are mostly £1 ones) also sell them. Re. the Congress, I can’t say for the rest of the UK but I’d say where politicians are involved personalities are certainly disordered. I like the cowboy image of the US but then I would say that being over here. Re. the penguins, maybe they’d just stand (or waddle?) and laugh. I’m not sure I’ve had premonitions but I do feel déjà vu sometimes. There was something interesting that happened to me a while back (I’m pretty sure my mum doesn’t read my blog); I’d been driving my brother back from a party we’d been to in Manchester and it was winter so had the heating on and the music low because my brother was sleeping and I fell asleep, hit the central barrier (luckily going really slowly) then limped the car to a layby. It was 3am but I phoned a friend whose house I could almost see in the distance and just before her phone rang she stared at it, knowing it was going to ring. Pets; yes, a nearly-11-year-old (on Boxing Day) Jack Russell dog. I’m no maths expert but yes, knitting does look very logical. 
Franki deMerle is the author of Dragonfly Dreams, Deception Past, and Ripples on the Surface. Her name is on the Wall of Tolerance at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Montgomery, Alabama, and at the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr Memorial in Washington, DC, as a founding member of the Build the Dream Foundation. She was born in Memphis, Tennessee, raised in Huntsville, Alabama, and lives in the US Pacific Northwest.
The eighteenth special episode of the Bailey’s Writing Tips podcast was released on 9th May 2011 and featured the second day of five as a volunteer at Oundle Literature Festival here in Northamptonshire, England. The content has never been released other than website links (on my website 
