Tag Archives: fiction

WINGSPREAD Zine for January, 2026


Spreading wings in a perplexing world
January, 2026                                                    James P. Hurd

Please forward and share this zine with others. Thank you.

Contents

  • Writer’s Corner
  • Blessed Unbeliever 
  • This month’s story: “A Strange Day at the Office”
  • This month’s puzzler
  • WINGSPREAD Zine subscription information
  • Wisdom

Writer’s Corner

Dedicated to the world of words and to those people who create them.

NEW BOOK!  I have begun assembling a new book gleaned from the last ten years of my blogs, along with new and revised stories about flying, Latin America, growing up fundamentalist, and about religious faith. Updates will be coming.

Want to browse WINGSPREAD stories from the archives? Click here, then click under “archives” at   https://jimhurd.com/     These stories include memoirs, stories about bush flying, personal essays and other topics.

Here are a few examples:

The Annual Physical (humor)  https://jimhurd.com/2024/10/

Pitch Perfect (flying)                  https://jimhurd.com/2024/03/

Mission to Mexico                      https://jimhurd.com/2020/10/01/mission-to-mexico/

Writer’s Tip:. Supercharge your writing with sensual experience. Don’t tell the reader how you character feels. Make your reader feel these emotions. Use sounds (the wind), sights (a flowering meadow), touch (she ran her hand over the plane’s cold aluminum skin), and, often neglected but powerful senses—taste (sweet, salt, sour, bitter) and smell (perfume, smoke, fresh air, decay). These sensual experiences draw the reader into your constructed world.

.On Craft and Quality

  • “Good writing is rewriting.” – Truman Capote
  • “Easy reading is da*n hard writing.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • “Less is more.” – Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (so true in writing)
  • “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” – Stephen King (try to eliminate them)
  • “No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.” – Robert Frost
  • “If a story is in you, it has to come out.” – William Faulkner

On Discipline and Persistence

  • “A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.” – Richard Bach
  • “The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” – Louis L’Amour
  • “Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.”
                Chuck Close
  • “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
                Benjamin Franklin

Digital resources: Where publish your blog? I use a WordPress website. Friends of mine use Substack. If you blog on one platform, it is easy to “share” your blog on another.

Word of the month. PRIMARY (v.). To try to eliminate a person from office by opposing them in a primary election. For example, if a Republican U.S. Representative comes from a district that has always been safely red Republican, the only real way to challenge her is to primary her. That is, put money and support into another candidate who wants the Republican nomination and try to beat her in the primaries. Used in a sentence:: “Because the President doesn’t like her, he’ll probably try to primary her in 2026.”

Task for you: If you have an anecdote or quote you wish to submit to publish in WINGSPREAD, send it to me for consideration.

TV series of the month: Shakespeare & Hathaway. The BBC’s funny sleuthing stories about Lu and Frank, private investigators in Stratford-on-Avon. Find them on BritBox―my favorite streaming service. BritBox also has Agatha Christie’s Pirot, Sherlock Holmes, Chesterton’s Father Brown, Jane Austin movies and many others. I love it that my kids add me to their subscriptions, If I hit a paywall I just punch the button and never see a bill. Why is that?

BLESSED UNBELIEVER novel

Sean’s serene childhood turns to tortured adolescence as he leaves for college and finds himself telling people he’s an atheist—.at a Bible Institute!

Available in paper or Kindle version at Wipf and Stock Publishers, Amazon https://a.co/d/9su5F3o or wherever good books are sold.

Hashtags: #blessedunbeliever #christianwriter #babyloss #southerncalifornia #planes #aviation #humanist #pilotlife #religion #travel #aviationgeek #orangecounty #godless #atheism

New story

“A Strange Day at the Office” (a chapter from my Blessed Unbeliever novel)

Then Myra went crazy. Dear, bubbly Myra, not quite obese but pleasantly plump, long dark hair, black eyes, plenty of lipstick, gregarious, and the owner of a loud, sultry voice. She radiated Eau de Toilette and brought fun with her wherever she went.

Marion told Duane, “Put some music on your radio.” When the music started, Myra jumped up on her chair, then onto her desk, revealing high heels and plump legs showing through her sheer hose. She flung her arms above her head, swayed her hips, twirled her short red dress, and sang lustily, her gold bracelets and Star of David earrings swinging in time as Marion and Duane sang and clapped. For Sean, this was a day to remember . . .

Then the big boss walked in . . .

To read more,click here: https://tinyurl.com/ntad9bn3

Leave a comment on the website, subscribe and share with others. Thanks.

You can also access my articles on Substack:   https://jameshurd.substack.com/

This month’s puzzler (thanks to NPR)

This is a phonetic puzzle. I’m going to read you some sentences. Each sentence contains homophones of two opposites. (Ex. People in Albany enunciate well. (all, none)

Note: The homophones may be buried inside words, but they’re always discreet syllables. They always change spelling from their parts in the sentence.

1. The model wore a timepiece on her ankle.
2. Who will underwrite the cost of the sarong?
3. This is a rare Bolivian diamond.
4. The customer got a souvenir from the pharmacy.
5. Let’s celebrate by throwing a party.
6. The stoker must reignite the furnace daily.
7. Can buffalo experience hypertension?

 (Answer will appear in next month’s WINGSPREAD newsletter.)

Answer to last month’s puzzler: 

What is odd about this paragraph: “This paragraph is odd. What is its oddity? You may not find it at first, but this paragraph is not normal. What is wrong? It’s just a small thing, but an oddity that stands out if you find it, what is it? You must know your days will not go on until you find out what is odd. You will pull your hair out. Your insomnia will push you until your poor brain finally short circuits trying to find an oddity in this paragraph. Good luck.” 

The oddity in this paragraph is, there are no E’s in it. Not a single E.

For a time, E was the most popular letter. But that paragraph above does not contain an E.

Subscribe free to this Ezine  

Click here WINGSPREAD Ezine signup | Wingspread  to subscribe to this WINGSPREAD ezine, sent direct to your email inbox, about once a month. You will receive a free article for subscribing. Please share this URL with interested friends, “like” it on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, etc.

If you wish to unsubscribe from this Wingspread Ezine, send an email to hurdjames1941@gmail.com  and put in the subject line: “unsubscribe.” (I won’t feel bad, promise!) Thanks.

Wisdom

Visual: “Inside the Warm Glow,” by Kaoru Yamada.

Be present, O merciful God, and protect us through the hours of this night, so that we who are wearied by the changes and chances of this life may rest in your eternal changelessness; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.—BCP

Loving the unlovable:

“There is someone I love, even though I don’t approve of what he does. There is someone I accept, though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive, though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is me.” Misattributed to C.S. Lewis

Social skills:

“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go.”

—Oscar Wilde

Child discipline in the electronic age:

I caught my son chewing on electrical cords so I had to ground him. He’s doing better currently and now conducting himself properly.

Obsolete Objects & Concepts

  • fopdoodle – foolish or insignificant person
  • beadledom – petty, fussy authority
  • zounds – exclamation (“God’s wounds!”)
  • gadzooks – mild oath (“God’s hooks!”)
  • smock – woman’s undergarment (now mostly archaic in that sense)
  • flapdoodle – nonsense
  • truckle-bed – a low bed stored under another

Upscale dining

Rapid aging

As they wait for the bus, Mother tells little Phillip to say he’s 4 years old if the driver asks, so he can ride for free.

As they get into the bus, the driver asks Phillip how old he is.

“I am 4 years old,” Phillip replied.

“And when will you be six years old?” asked Perry.

“When I get off the bus.”

WINGSPREAD Zine for Nov./Dec., 2025


Spreading wings in a perplexing world
November/December, 2025                                                    James P. Hurd

Please forward and share this ezine with others. Thank you.

Contents

  • Writer’s Corner
  • Blessed Unbeliever 
  • This month’s story: Plumbers and Electricians
  • This month’s puzzler: Who done it?
  • WINGSPREAD Ezine subscription information
  • Wisdom

Writer’s Corner

Dedicated to people who love words. Words are miracles that brand humans as sentient creatures, creative, inventive, exploring. Taste the words as they roll around on your tongue; let them fill you with a sense of wonder.

NEW BOOK!  I have begun assembling a new book of stories and essays gleaned from the last ten years of my blogs. Maybe I’ll group these under the sections: Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. Spoiler alert: I’m in the “Winter” phase now, and looking back to those other seasons. I’ll keep you posted.

Why it’s important to write

Want to browse archived WINGSPREAD stories? Click here, then click under “archives”     https://jimhurd.com/    These stories include memoirs, stories about bush flying, personal essays and other topics. They’re searchable for key words.

Here are a few examples:

The joys of my annual physical exam: https://jimhurd.com/2024/10/25/the-annual-physical/

Why did it take so long to discover that I’m not weird? https://jimhurd.com/2024/02/06/a-letter-to-my-fourteen-year-old-self-you-are-not-weird/

Writer’s tip: Transgress. You seize the reader’s interest if you write something unexpected. Examples: “I’ve given up on Jesus.” “Morality is so 19th century.” Of course, your piece will sort out these shocking statements and explain what you mean. But use counterintuitive and contrary statements: contradictions, hyperbole, even forbidden words (used carefully). The object? Transgressing grabs the reader’s attention.

Words and metaphors

“a unicorn of a girl” (unique type)

“he shat his pants” (quite vivid)

haplotype (a sequence of polymorphic genes that tend to be inherited together). This is the way Ancestry.com discovers your ancestry.

Digital resources:

I still own my Strunk and White, Elements of Style, but you can ask AI (Artificial Intelligence) anything. Try typing into your browser: “chatgpt.” For instance: “What’s the difference between insure and ensure?” “When must you use a comma before a conjunction?” or “Please critique the attached story and give me suggestions on how to improve it.” What I do not do is ask AI to write the story for me.

Word of the month. FAIN (obsolescent): Gladly, willingly

Task for you: Write about how joyful you are without saying how joyful you are. (That is, show; don’t tell.)

BLESSED UNBELIEVER novel

Available in paper or Kindle version at Wipf and Stock Publishers, Amazon https://a.co/d/9su5F3o or wherever good books are sold.

Hashtags for the book: #california #author #christianwriter #babyloss #southerncalifornia #oc #planes #socal #aviationdaily #humanist #pilotlife #blessedunbeliever #religion #travel #christianauthor #aviationgeek #orangecounty #godless

New story: ”Plumbers and Electricians”

Retirement is deceptive. You’re lulled into thinking that things will pretty much go on as they always have. They usually do. But then, life happens.

I’m working in my college office when the phone rings. “Jim, I don’t know what to do. I’m just sitting here on the sofa sewing and three times I’ve felt faint—like I’m about to pass out.”

My mind races. Is this just in Barbara’s head? In the past, I’ve joked with her that I’ve decided on her epitaph: “I told you I was sick!” But what if something’s really going on? She’s never complained about feeling faint before.

“How often is this happening to you?

“About every half hour or so. Oh! I feel like I’m fainting now!”

“Okay—I’m calling 911 and I’ll come home as soon as I can.”

I call 911, run out to my car, and drive home, praying as I go. When people ask me how prayer works, I always have a ready answer: “I don’t know. But the Bible tells us to pray, and Jesus prayed, so I pray.” . . . To read more, click here: https://tinyurl.com/4tshbrbb

Please “rate” the story and “share” it with others. Thanks.

You can also access my articles on Substack:   Plumbers and Electricians – by James P Hurd

This month’s puzzler. thanks to Car Talk Archives

This one is clever. You have to look closely at the following paragraph. You should actually not read it; you should have someone else read it to you to get the full experience. But you can read it if you have to. 

Here it is. 

“This paragraph is odd. What is its oddity? You may not find it at first, but this paragraph is not normal. What is wrong? It’s just a small thing, but an oddity that stands out. If you find it, what is it? You must know your days will not go on until you find out what is odd. You will pull your hair out. Your insomnia will push you until your poor brain finally short circuits trying to find an oddity in this paragraph. Good luck.” 

So what is it?

Remember, you have to examine the paragraph really well.

Good luck.

 (Answer will appear in next month’s WINGSPREAD newsletter.)

Answer to last month’s puzzler: 

So, a night watchman hears a person scream “No, Frank!” Then a gunshot. He enters the room and sees a minister, a plumber and a doctor. But how does he know that it was the minister that pulled the trigger?

Easy. 

The doctor and the plumber are women. So he made the likely guess that none of the women were named Frank. 

Subscribe free to this Ezine  

Click here https://jimhurd.com/home/  to subscribe to this WINGSPREAD ezine, sent direct to your email inbox, every month. You will receive a free article for subscribing. Please share this URL with interested friends, “like” it on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, etc.

If you wish to unsubscribe from this Wingspread Ezine, send an email to hurdjames1941@gmail.com  and put in the subject line: “unsubscribe.” (I won’t feel bad, promise!) Thanks.

Wisdom

Q. How do you keep your car from being stolen?
A. Buy a standard shift model

Q. How do you send a message in code?
A. Write in cursive

“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naiveté. Maria Popova

Here are some irreverent trivia questions about college football:

What does the average Alabama football player get on his SATs?
Drool.

How many Michigan State freshmen football players does it take to change a light bulb?
None. That’s a sophomore course.

How did the Auburn football player die from drinking milk?
The cow fell on him.

Two Texas A&M football players were walking in the woods. One of them said, ” Look, a dead bird.”
The other looked up in the sky and said, “Where?”

What do you say to a Florida State University football player dressed in a three-piece suit?
“Will the defendant please rise.”

How can you tell if a Clemson football player has a girlfriend?
There’s tobacco juice on both sides of the pickup truck.

What do you get when you put 32 Kentucky cheerleaders in one room?
A full set of teeth.

University of Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh is only going to dress half of his players for the game this week. The other half will have to dress themselves.

How is the Kansas football team like an opossum?
They play dead at home and get killed on the road

How do you get a former University of Miami football player off your porch?
Pay him for the pizza.

On the Act of Writing:

  • “The first draft is just telling yourself the story.” – Terry Pratchett
  • “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time—or the tools—to write.”
    – Stephen King
  • “Writing is a way of tasting life twice.” – Anaïs Nin
  • “Write what you know.” – Mark Twain
  • “Write the book you want to read.” – Toni Morrison
  • “Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.” – J.K. Rowling
  • “Writing is a dog’s life, but the only life for me.” – Gustave Flaubert

Why some people don’t like Daylight Savings Time

Wisdom and Philosophy

  • “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”—Franklin D. Roosevelt
  • “Be yourself―everyone else is already taken.”—Oscar Wilde
  • “The mind is everything. What you think you become.”—Buddha 
  • “The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.”—Lao Tzu
  • “In three words I can sum up everything I’ve learned about life: it goes on.”
    —Robert Frost
  • “The unexamined life is not worth living.”—Socrates

Pitch Perfect

It’s a normal smoggy day at Chino airport. I’ve just taken off with my student, Stan, whom I’m checking out in his two-seater, fabric-covered Taylorcraft. The takeoff goes normally but after we level off and pick up speed, Stan can’t keep the plane’s nose down.

“Trim forward, Stan.”

“I am.”

“Trim down more.”

“I am!”

The plane is still pitching up violently, threatening to stall. I see Stan straining to push the control wheel forward, but it isn’t helping. What’s wrong?

I’m studying anthropology at Cal State Fullerton and need a little extra cash so when Hank Bradford lures me over to Chino with the promise, “I’ll give you a twin-engine checkout in the Aero Commander” (a larger twin-engine plane), I jump at the chance to work for United California Aviation—the outsize name for Hank’s dubious fixed-base operation. UCA consists of an office, a small workroom with a picture of a naked woman hanging on the wall and a few hundred square feet claimed from the vast and empty adjoining hangar. Hank has opened a small café and offers hamburgers to a few army personnel temporarily stationed here. He acts as a maître d, circulating through the room chatting up the troops as he follows a waitress around, pretending to grab her hips.

I never see the promised Aero Commander. Rather, I end up doing routine maintenance on random aircraft that show up. No tools available—I bring my own. But one day I arrive at work about noon on a Thursday and Hank says, “Wanna’ take the Apache and fly some fishermen down to Baja for the weekend?” Immediately I say yes, even though I’ll miss a day of my classes and even though I have little time to prepare for the flight. But you never turn down a chance to fly a multiengine plane. A fun weekend.

Now today I’m still trying to figure out why Stan can’t control his airplane. “Stan! Give me the wheel.” I grab the dual control wheel and it just about hits me in the face! The airplane is still trying mightily to pitch up. If the nose rises a bit more, the airplane will stall and plummet us to the ground. I barely keep it level, forcing the control wheel forward. “Stan, we have to turn back to the airport; something’s wrong. I’ll land the plane because I don’t know how it’ll react if we slow up.” I hold forward pressure on the wheel all the way through the landing.

I walk around the plane, suspecting something’s wrong with the elevator control system, those “flippers” at the tail that pitch the airplane up or down but they seem to be operating normally.

Then I notice the small trim tab hinged at the rear of one of the elevator surfaces. This tiny deflector moves the larger elevators up or down. So I yell to Stan who is still in the cockpit, “Stan; turn the trim tab crank counterclockwise.” As Stan turns the crank to lower the nose, I see the trim tab moving downward. In flight, this would force the elevator up, which would pitch the nose up­—the opposite of how it’s supposed to work. The mechanic (probably my boss, Hank) had hooked up the trim tab control cable backwards! “Stan; we’re done flying until I get this control fixed!”

This flight could have been a disaster—I hate to think what would have happened if Stan had been flying without an instructor. In the future I determine that after maintenance is done on an airplane I need to perform a more thorough preflight check—including the trim tab.

WINGSPREAD for February, 2025


Spreading wings in a perplexing world
February, 2025                                                    James P. Hurd

Please forward and share this Ezine with others. Thank you.

Contents

  • Writer’s Corner
  • Blessed Unbeliever 
  • This month’s story: How does a widower work a washer?
  • This month’s puzzler: Sherlock Holme’s age
  • WINGSPREAD Ezine subscription information
  • Wisdom

Writer’s Corner

No matter the genre in which you write, your published work can transform you into a change agent. When your words get read, you have an impact in your readers’ lives that ripples out into the world.

“The pen is mightier than the sword.” Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu, or The Conspiracy

“Many wearing rapiers are afraid of goosequills.” William Shakespeare, Hamlet

Tip for writers: Most writing can be improved by tightening. But how? Try going through your piece and eliminating all the adverbs and adjectives. Then go back and insert only as many as you absolutely need.

Writing task for you: Write an opening line or two for a novel or a short story. I will include some of your efforts in the March WINGSPREAD. Here are some things to help you:

  1. Introduce the protagonist
  2. Give a hint of time and place
  3. Never start with a backstory or flashback, or with a dream
  4. Introduce a problem/conflict/mystery facing the protagonist
  5. Introduce your “story-worthy problem.” If you don’t have one, you don’t have a story.
  6. Signal the genre of your story (your title may help do this).
  7. Reveal your voice. Things like: what “person” you write in (1st, 3rd), what tense (present, past), what dominant point-of-view?
  8. Foreshadow: give hints of trouble to come, for example, “But things were not as they seemed.”

Book of the month: David G. Myers, How Do We Know Ourselves? Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. 2022. 253 pp. I have read this with great profit. Myers uncovers secrets of human behavior—egotism, paying attention, two-brain processing, judging others, divisions and a host of others—and briefly explains each one. A gold mine for the non-professional who is curious about understanding, and even changing, others’ behavior and even their own! Short chapters. The book does seem choppy and many times the reader would desire a deeper discussion.

BLESSED UNBELIEVER novel

Sean McIntosh left his Fundamentalist childhood and walked the road toward atheism—while attending Torrey Bible Institute! Spoiler alert: it didn’t work out very well. Blessed Unbeliever (paper or Kindle version) can be found at Wipf and Stock Publishers, Amazon https://a.co/d/9su5F3o or wherever good books are sold.

New story: The Widower and the Washer

Housekeeping has always been a mystery to me. Right up there with how you deal with small children. I don’t even remember actually meeting any of my children until they started kindergarten. My loving partner unselfconsciously assumed childrearing tasks while I concentrated on more important problems such as “How do we fight climate change?” Or, “How do we end the war in Afghanistan?” . . .

To read more, click here:  https://shorturl.at/SXrN8

Leave a comment on the website and share with others. Thanks.

This month’s puzzler

 Holmes and Watson were sitting in Holmes’ study at 221B Baker Street when Watson said, “Holmes; I’ve been rooming with you for several months but you’ve never told me how old you are!”

Holmes replied, “The day before yesterday I was 35 and next year I’ll be 38.”

“Impossible!” replied Watson.

But Holmes was correct. The question is, how would that be possible?

(Answer will appear in next month’s WINGSPREAD newsletter.)

Answer to last month’s puzzler: 

Recall I left something at my friend’s house and he mailed it back to me. However, I cannot now use it nor use it in the future. What is it?

It is a stamp on an envelope I had left at his house. He mailed it back to me.

Subscribe free to this Ezine  

Click here https://jimhurd.com/home/  for a free subscription to this WINGSPREAD ezine, sent direct to your email inbox, every month. You will receive a free article for subscribing. Please share this URL with interested friends, “like” it on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, etc.

If you wish to unsubscribe from this Wingspread Ezine, send an email to hurd@usfamily.net and put in the subject line: “unsubscribe.” (I won’t feel bad, promise!) Thanks.

Wisdom

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —

—Emily Dickinson

“Critical thinking without hope is cynicism. Hope without critical thinking is naiveté. Maria Popova

“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.” Elmore Leonard

Why is ‘abbreviated’ such a long word?

___________________________________

Why is it that doctors call what they do ‘practice’?

___________________________________

Why is lemon juice made with artificial flavor, and dishwashing liquid made with real lemons?

___________________________________

Why is the man who invests all your money called a broker?

___________________________________

Why is the time of day with the slowest traffic called rush hour?

___________________________________

Why isn’t there mouse-flavored cat food?

___________________________________

Why didn’t Noah swat those two mosquitoes?

___________________________________

Why do they sterilize the needle for lethal injections?

___________________________________

You know that indestructible black box that is used on airplanes? Why don’t they make the whole plane out of that stuff?

___________________________________

Why don’t sheep shrink when it rains?

___________________________________

Why are they called apartments when they are all stuck together?

___________________________________

If flying is so safe, why do they call the airport the terminal?