Writer and attorney Nancy Jane Moore just finished a beta read of The Red: Trials. She says it got her thinking about constitutions, resulting in a new entry for the series of legal posts she’s been writing at Book View Café.

Here’s an excerpt from Legal Fictions: Worshipping the Constitution:

Under monarchies, soldiers pledge their loyalty to the king, but in a democracy the loyalty is to the law. And no one – not even the president – is above the law. This makes for good principles and good fiction.

It also means that the U.S. Constitution has almost religious status for soldiers, not to mention for a lot of lawyers. In the legal profession, constitutional law is considered an elite area of practice. When the Supreme Court says something is “unconstitutional,” it implies that the law in question betrays something fundamental in our country.

Yet a constitution is only a set of rules that detail how we’re going to run the country. While it defines the ground rules of society, it’s not scripture*.

Find the complete post here.

I’ve never tried writing flash fiction. Until very recently I didn’t even know what it was, but now that I do, I find the concept fascinating.

A full story concept needs a beginning, middle, and end, along with a story problem and character change. Every time I sit down to develop a story, I feel challenged to come up with all these elements, even at novel length. So I’m fascinated by the ability to accomplish all of this in an ultra short story.

This week, Book View Café releases a collection of flash fiction, Flashes of Illumination by our own Nancy Jane Moore. Here’s the background:

Nancy Jane Moore wrote her first flash fiction many years ago when every one in her writing group decided to enter a contest for one-page stories. None of them won, but she got hooked and has been writing short-shorts ever since. Her first project for Book View Café was posting a free flash fiction every week for a year. Some were reprints, others older stories that needed one more revision, but quite a few were written in the week they went up. This 52-story collection includes most of those stories and a few new ones as well.

Nancy Jane Moore’s other books include the collection Conscientious Inconsistencies and the novella Changeling. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including the two volumes of The Shadow Conspiracy. She is a founding member of Book View Café and lives in Austin.