bikermouse : Thanks for reading and commenting. I agree with your suggestion. On balance I prefer your rephrasing of the opening two sentences of "The Wind Over The Border". It reads better combined into a single sentence. Personally, the general flow of the text is an aspect of that piece that I'm dissatisfied with. It's not so bad at the beginning but later where I had to squeeze the word count hard the sentences get choppy and the rhythm is disrupted. I'm sure that one of the secrets of writing well is to strike a good balance between long and short sentences. In this excercise, cutting an original back to 500 words sometimes results in an ugly structure for the resultant text but I don't think it needs to stay ugly. I think it just means that you have to try harder to restore the flow again. Another editing pass is what's called for. If you've got the patience ! There are certainly some good examples in this thread where it's been managed very well. I like cambert's 2nd story a lot. The idea of a perfect aerial photograph ties in quite neatly with a literal interpretation of heaven as a place "up there", and that fantasy of the afterlife as the ability to be all seeing and all knowing. It's an original idea (but I also agree with dialyn that I got a bit hung up on trying to work out the relationship of the protaganists) Geminirand : I can see how this one would make a good set up for some later writing where the headless corpses make a reappearance. Is that what you have planned in your novel? I was a bit confused by her "religious" husband also becoming a headless corpse when he wasn't involved in the original ceremony and so I presume he isn't supposed to have any supernatural powers. But perhaps I'm meant to be confused. Obviously there is a mystery behind the (normal!?) supernatural events here as you're hinting in the final paragraph... Still, just goes to show that beheading isn't the way to stop a witch from rising again. I'll bear that in mind next time I see one... BellaMorte : Like in cambert's story the most frightening ideas can be the ones that reveal supressed information about ourselves. This is a major spoiler for anyone who hasn't seen it but the recent file "The Others" with Nicole Kidman explored this sort of territory and very chilling it was too. I'd thoroughly recommend it. I like the way you handle the dialog in this story. It builds up the tension very nicely. My only criticism would be that the start of the piece is in quite a jokey style, with the various asides e.g. "I'm not the screaming type" and then it all gets more "serious". I actually enjoyed the jokey style and the more "straight" horror but I'm not sure they blend well together. Pretty hard to do in 500 words!