Joshua Harding

I'm an environmentalist, a cemetery restorer, artist, puppeteer, carpenter, actor, nuclear missile mechanic, mortuary officer...and a writer

The Knowing:

"This is American Stories. I’m your host, Moira Dickenson. Thanks for joining us. If you’re just tuning in, I’m speaking with Ben Wilder of Medical Lake, Washington. Three years ago Ben, his w...

Praying

The young woman’s stomach growled audibly. “You hungry, sweetie?” asked the young man. “Of course,” she replied. “Always.” The woman was lean and tall and her long, muscular legs were ...

All I Want for Christmas

Ben had never slept well on Christmas Eve. Never a wink. No visions of sugarplums; no long winter’s nap for Ben. It wasn’t the giddy anticipation of a ten-year-old cataloging possibl...

Draft Blog Post:

Let's face it: my book is a risk. Which is part of the reason I chose to self-publish.

Author Bio:

Joshua Harding is a novelist, short story author, and award-winning poet and horror writer. His fiction is currently featured on Writer’s Digest, QuarterReads, and Acidic Fiction. He studied Crea...

Stealing Time:

-- A college physics student works nights at a hospice. Clandestinely, he takes a device from the physics lab that can harvest time-dilating neutrino particles from an emission source. He can then ...

Layover:

-- Maybe there’s a sub-demon or demi-fiend who needs to put in his time before he can become a full demon (like Clarence’s 2nd Class rank in “It’s a Wonderful Life”). He gets a generous amount of h...

Robotopia:

-- What are the robots of Robotopia motivated by? Why do they exist? Why do they persevere, carry on, and make more of themselves? Why do humans do so? The Colonial Commander could ask this of X.50...

Andy the Androgynous Android:

-- Maybe the inciting moment that gets Andy out on stage happens at the very beginning. One of the top acts quits and storms out in a huff. The manager has no act to fill the empty slot. Claiming t...

Red Lakes Blurb:

No greatness was ever borne without pain.... A nuclear holocaust has devastated humanity. Out of the ashes rises a new totalitarian Soviet state that bears a chilling resemblance to a major fast ...

ZEAL Magazine:

-- In Pursuit of Warrior. Expository piece on the Warrior fighting game. Considered the first PvP fighting game. Beautiful vector graphics and probably the origin of my vector graphics fetish that ...

Cheat Code:

-- Maybe the protagonist winds up at a dance with the girl he’s always pined for. At the dance a couple of kids who witnessed him best the school bully come over to congratulate him. They talk abou...

Invisabeth:

Outline: I. Childhood: 1. Elizabeth arrives at Samantha’s school and she’s invisible to all her classmates. Elizabeth and Samantha become friends. 2. Elizabeth invites herself over to Samantha’...

Potential Magic:

-- Potential additional character: a second female who is hispanic whose father was one of the workers who moved Janice’s shed before the hurricane. She’s a Latina punk and maybe can read some of t...

The Knowing

“Now it’s over I’m dead and I haven’t done anything that I want. Or, I’m still alive and there’s nothing I want to do.” -- They Might Be Giants

Every Girl:

-- Celebrity guy’s name: Dustin Bezoar

Listverse:

-- 10 symbols hidden in colonial gravestones (cemeteries): --- Boobs. --- F in place of S --- AE --- Masonic symbols --- Little mustaches on Death’s Heads --- People wer...

DRAFT Magazine:

-- Gluten Intolerance: A Eulogy for a Love of Beer. Article that retraces my many and varied experiences with beer that will be sorely missed following the development of gluten intolerance. Experi...

Below:

-- Maybe the trapped cavers survive by eating blind cave fish. Maybe it’s a wholly undiscovered species—a species unique to this cave system that they drive to extinction by eating them. One of the...

Methadone Phone:

The local dispensary needed to hire more tech help. The social workers who manned the desk (especially at three in the morning when the real hardcore users would come by for a fix) weren't ver...

Joy List:

- Playing Xbox on a snowy weekend while Nickie snuggles and naps in our homey downstairs. - Gravestone rubbing at Old York Cemetery - MrCreepyPasta reading Invoking Ganesh - Showing my Scrims to G...

The Knowing (Podcast):

-- Maybe combine two 20-min. episodes so that they’re 40-min. episodes. Maybe combine Ben and Visha’s episodes into one. Maybe, to raise the stakes on the exposition pieces, have Moira attend one o...

Bones of Contention:

-- Maybe there’s different apes that are used in the experiment: Chimps and Bonobos. Maybe the doctor suggests bonobos because their closer genetic profile to humans makes the odds of successful hy...

Spirit Quest (I Know!):

-- When Sal is showing Aaron the temporal dome’s control panel, he tells him that if the meter gets above 715 Kelvin for too long, the link back to the 21st century will be broken. While they can r...

Gail’s Replacement:

If beige were a zip code, it would be Downers Grove, Illinois. It was commercially-zoned suburban sprawl outside Chicago. It so resembled a hundred thousand suburban sprawls outside of C...

Helpdesk

-- Format: Part 1: Caller dials the Helpdesk number and is prompted to select a number for their particular problem. The listener is introduced to the caller’s personality and problem as they mutte...

Robotopia:

-- What if the protagonist (human) is female and asexual? X.509 and she relate over the notion of being unencumbered by desire and are free to pursue intellectual and scientific knowledge.

Tennessee Short Story:

-- The parallels between different churches as a buffet where you can pick and choose what you want to believe, preachers cherrypicking which Bible verses best support their point of view, and the ...

Catch-23:

-- Research: how does using nukes in Japan in 1945 square with the Geneva Conventions?

Mud Day:

-- Is there a sort of reconciliation between Eric and his dad toward the end? Does Eric ask if he can spend the school year with his mom and summers back in Fairbanks? Does the dad agree to discuss...

Anthology:

"Prepare to hear of occurrences which are usually deemed marvellous." -- Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

Intervention:

-- Solarpunk short story where a family must perform an intervention on their aging father who is addicted to polluting. In a near-future USA President Tammy Duckworth addresses the nation while e...

Virtual Journal:

-- Band name: Unique Cliche The summer I was seventeen was when I started fooling around with my parents’ housekeeper. She lived with us and slept in the coat closet. Don’t m...

Today's Etiquette Tip:

Here's an etiquette tip: if I tell you my dad died of lung cancer, please don't let your first question be, "Did he smoke?". That's like, if your mom died of heart disease, asking if she was a lard...

I Don't Want to be Embalmed:

I don’t want to be embalmed—pickled in formaldehyde like a dissection frog, smelling like an experiment gone wrong. My body fixed up as if by a taxidermist to give my loved ones a close facsimile o...

A Fictional Rambling (of sorts):

It's stupid; I know. I call the number, but I want it to go to voicemail. I don’t want anyone to answer. It’s not that I’m afraid of conversation—stupefied by awkward pauses. I’m no chickensh...

An Empty Room

Holly and Andrew picked me up at the airport. I hadn’t seen Holly in seven years; Andrew in less than 24-hours, me having made the reverse trip only the previous night. It was a long ride. Navigati...

Something to restore your faith in humanity:

Seen on I-94 East this morning:

Red Lakes

Chapter 1: October The blood would be thick that day. A front had crept out of the east the night before, leaving the air frosty and still. Not a cloud, save a few shreds near t...

Self-Love:

"I wonder what that woman is doing at a place like this all by herself." "Maybe she's a lesbian, but for herself. Maybe she's a Self-bian." "That's pretty good. Did you come up with ...

7/23/2014:

-- My dad told me not to reinvent the wheel. I told him that sometimes you get a better wheel.

Requiem for the Little Green Notebooks:

-- O! Thou little emerald tomes! How oft did ere I scrawl upon thy pages. Filling thee like paper chalices, running over, with the fervent tracings of my heart! The fiendish concoctions of my ad...

Burgers:

You can almost compare having sex with different women to eating at various burger joints. Red Robin is the ginger who tastes good and is fun and knows how to party, but she's really popular ...

Sound Alloys:

-- Golden silence. Silver whispers. Bronze discussion. Leaden bellows.

Dream 1/2/15

I dreamt I was an astronaut working on the ISS. During a routine spacewalk I found Roman artifacts floating in orbit with me.

God's Ex-Wife

What if the Devil wasn’t a “Him” or a man at all, but actually God’s ex-wife? That would explain a lot! So many parallels to the lives of broken families: we are all children caught in between. Th...

Dream, 7/30/14

I dreamt last night that I butchered a human head.

Big Bang

I had a thought about the expanding universe and the expanding consciousness.