🎉 Our next novel writing master class starts in –! Claim your spot →
Advice, insights and news
Free 10-day publishing courses
Free publishing webinars
Free EPUB & PDF typesetting tool
Launch your book in style
Assemble a team of pros
A weekly short story contest
Author on Reedsy Prompts since Feb, 2020
Submitted to Contest #51
Love Sequestered By Jay Seate Lisa ran her palm over the smooth lacquered surface of the antique vanity. She’d found the beautiful relic at an estate sale near Carmel. She opened each drawer, one after the other. The aroma from its wood was like inhaling the past. Underneath the lining in the top left drawer, she found a piece of paper withered with age, yellowed enough to be the Magna Carta. She carefully removed it. It wasn’t a document, but a letter. “This must have been here forever,” Lisa breathed. Her intent was to replace the an...
Headache By Jay Seate I’m back home now, but I can’t sleep. With the remnants of day long sense suspended, I drive around most of the night. Having the streets mostly to myself, I don’t pay much attention to signal lights. They seem extravagant at three in the morning. I cruise past everything you see in most towns: a strip-mall housing a liquor store, a Mexican restaurant, a tattoo parlor, and an H&R Block, all closed. The businesses are dark but a streetlight casts the reflection of my wheels off the divided walls of glass. Brigh...
Submitted to Contest #50
Standing Out By J. T. Seate All of us have days or moments that stand out in our lives. It might have been when we found the right person, or were married, or when we held our newborn infant in our arms, and so on. One day can often change everything, and for me, that day came within the walls of a small church in an equally small and relatively quiet town. John was home again and his presence completed made possible the event which brought with it such significance. On that day, in the presence of sixty or so gatherers, my son wa...
Submitted to Contest #29
Across the Street By Troy Seate            The Johnsons lived across the street while I was growing up. In their backyard was an old, defunct refrigerator. As it lay rusting, it reminded me of King Tut’s sarcophagus covered with marshmallow wrap. Mr. Johnson was a bit creepy. I’d just finished reading Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man, so my mind was wired for the strange or unusual. Whenever he looked at me from across the street with that kind of hollow-eyed stare, I felt like someone...
Submitted to Contest #27
Basham’s TheoryBy Troy Seate Some men look toward retirement like a capsized sailor might look at a spit of land on the horizon, but Edgar Basham hadn’t been one of them. He missed the intrigue of the pursuit. He had cultivated a slight paunch, but retained the eyes of a cunning investigator above his salt-more-than-pepper mustache. He maintained his theory that, although God remained an unsubstantiated hypothesis, good and evil most definitely existed. He believed all individuals fell, to a greater or lesser degree, on a continuum. On one e...
Jay Seate has not written a bio yet!
Oops, you need an account for that!
Log in with your social account:
Or enter your email: