The Gift: One Thousand Stories, #2

By Jennifer Roush

The Gift is the second volume in One Thousand Stories, and contains three short stories featuring erotic tension at their core.

"Aspen" is a bite of forbidden fruit. "Burn" is the moment a smoldering relationship catches fire, and "The Gift" is a romantic take on Adam and Steve.

Questions at the end of each story titillate the mind, leaving you with a lingering curiosity. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Roush
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781540168658

Jennifer Roush

Raised on Star Trek, Dune, and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Jennifer prefers a good dose of biting social commentary in her speculative fiction, and with such influences as C. S. Friedman and Joan D. Vinge, uses gentle metaphor and a total lack of preachiness to do it. Her complex characters grow through their tense and challenging plots, through settings deliberately chosen to amplify the moral struggles we all face, but always with the assurance that you can kick back, put your feet up, and just enjoy an entertaining, funny, and haunting story if you want. Dedicated to the craft of writing well, Jennifer and her publishing company SmartyPants Publishing, Inc. work to grow authors of all genres who share in the love of a good story well told. To this end, SmartyPants maintains a learning site, critique group, and a host of upcoming projects including novels, anthologies, and a self-publishing and hybrid-publishing forum It is Jennifer’s work in life to not only tell her own stories, but to help other writers tell the stories that need to be told, and to get those stories into the hands of anyone who wants them. Good stories, well told, and distributed across the globe. Thank you for taking the time to get to know Jennifer! If you would like to contact Jennifer directly, she is available at: [e-mail] If you would like to contact SmartyPants Publishing, it is available at: www.smartypantspublishers.com

Book preview

Preface to One Thousand Stories

One Thousand Stories is a collection of short fiction. Short stories appear in their entirety in this series, and in cases where the fiction is very, very short (such as flash fiction), more than one story is presented here.

For each story, we supply questions for readers and for writers. At the end of the volume, we will supply links to more stories and to the courses that go into more detail about the writing subject exemplified in the tales.

Why do we do this?

Stories are meant to be shared. Not only are they meant to be shared to an audience, but the audience then takes the story and shares it with others—perhaps changing it, as in the case of often-told tales like Cinderella or Snow White. By asking you questions, we let the story sink in a little more.

The second reason is a little more self-indulgent and prosaic: we want you to think about our stories. Each story that’s presented is more than entertainment, it’s thoughtful or thought-provoking. It has a meaning besides the characters