Without-Feathers.com

If I had more time, I would write a shorter story.
Mark Twain

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Prose

Prose is something I struggle with—it’s not that I can’t find the words, it’s that I’m always nagged by the feeling that the images I’m trying to convey have lost something in the translation. I have a film-maker’s mind trapped in a writer’s mindset, so many of my prose pieces are more a stringing-together of vignettes and single moments than a traditional narrative line. Still, I flatter myself that I can rise to coherence when I need to—and I usually needed to for school, which is why most of the essays in this section are remnants from my college days. Oh, to be young and coherent again...

Essays

• Parallel Lives: Hamlet, Macbeth, and Richard III
  A comparison of three of Shakespeare’s most famous characters.
• The Royal Play: James I and Macbeth
  How Shakespeare’s play was influenced by his King and his times.
• The Value Of A Human: A Response To Godwin
  An argument against William Godwin’s famous “archbishop dilemma”.
• Why Animal Testing Is Unethical
  The case against animal testing, and the scientific alternatives. Slightly out-of-date, but the major points are still relevant.

Stories

• Plato’s Cave
  A dark, paranoid story set in the near future. (Published in my college’s arts magazine.)

Vignettes

• Entrenched
  A ghostly little scene. I never could think of a plot to go with it, so it landed here.
• The Perp
  A scene from just beyond an interrogation room.

Short Story Authors I Admire

• Roald Dahl
• Daphne du Maurier
• Shirley Jackson
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Dorothy Parker
• Guy de Maupassant