Rare Bits

Senator Patrick Leahy seethed with a primal fury. His skin, white hot with the pain of sudden birth gripped his creator’s throat with two gnarled hands. His master gasped helplessly, wriggling within Leahy’s iron hold with ever fading surges.
And then he stopped. Under Leahy’s thumbs the pulse- only moments ago a frantically pounding drumbeat- was [...]

It races. It races through us so completely that we cannot understand the damage. Like cast-off electrons radiating; cancerous and devastating, time permeates every cell with its poison.

Merrylander sat in the middle of the Vestibule, motionless. Around her one hundred and twenty-three Merrylanders puttered about; performing chores and duties with singular determination. A frail Merrylander [...]

He doesn’t think it has followed him. Sometimes, when the gasses in the cathode tubes flicker, the light does sometimes come perilously close to that terrible shade. But not quite, he tells himself. Not quite.
*     *     *
Archibald Lark was a brute of a man. Not particularly tall, mind you, nor particularly muscular, but there was [...]

One of my favorite blogs, the SF-themed io9.com, has an interesting article on writing short fiction. As a writer and an artist I found this to be a very useful jolt to my creative process.
3) Start crude, and then work on refining When I first tried writing a short story a week, I found [...]