The Side Effects of Endorphins

I started writing short stories about five years ago. It started a lot earlier than that. Before Covid, I once went to a little coffee house in Vancouver. On a good night we had 30 people who would come in and listen to us tell stories. I was unpublished at the time, so I was walking around with a giant imposter syndrome. However, it made me sit down and write.

I have no idea what the trigger point was to write short stories and send them to magazines. My first story that ever made it into a magazine was called La Rutina. The story came to me sitting down and talking to a family in central Mexico.. the family talked about common sense security procedures when they drove to the coast as a family. I found the story endearing and I had to write about it. I also intended to talk about some misconceptions of Mexico.

I have since been published 11 more times. I intend to do a brief summary of each of the stories I wrote and made it into print.. I would love for readers to follow along, however this is an organizing exercise for me as I move forward with publishing a collection of short stories. There are little pieces of me in each story.

Other stories published

• Bild Schon – story that takes place in Germany but inspired by a painting done using my grandsons finger paints.
• Celery – a story I kept revisiting and adding to. It’s about a guy in Calgary who drinks too much but has good intentions. He always returns his shopping carts
• Cowboy in Toronto – the story was hatched on a flight from somewhere to somewhere. I noticed on every single fight there was always a man with a cowboy hat. I wrote about a man and a cowboy hat I saw on that flight. And there is a weirdness that goes with a Toronto Blue Jays baseball game.
• Sandwich – this is deeply personal story that was taken from a chapter of the book I wrote. The book has been rejected once by a publisher, This story endures. Amanda was a character based on someone I met on a flight from Rochester New York back home.
• Waking Life – this story was based on a book. I read, recommended by my daughter. I believe the name of the book was Death of a Penguin. The story takes place in Phoebus. Virginia. It was the town where I ran my first 10K race.. My dad was at the finish line of the race whilst smoking a cigarette
• Dirty Currencies -this is another story that emerged from a lifelong friendship and a trip to these coast. My good friend who was high ranking person in the Air Force talked to me about sleazy attempts of our government to destroy the Nicaraguan economy. So I Wrote in from the perspective of a local.
• Ice Cream Sonata for Wind – this is a wild story about a man driving an ice cream truck during the wind storms of early November in Seattle.
• Hellbent – this was a story I had not looked at for a few years. It’s about it a man thrown into prison for a crime he may or may not have committed.
• Em Pleh – a few years ago I called my friend because I had not heard from his ex wife in a while. It turned out she passed away a few weeks back, and no one even noticed. I rewrote her story with a somewhat happier ending.
• No Picnic in The Park – this story means a lot to me. The entire story takes place on a picnic bench right down the street from where our daughter lives.. It’s pretty much a tribute to her. The story takes place during wildfire season. It is chaos and maybe there’s a lesson to be learned here. I sent the story to friends and some liked it but most did not. It is dark and it’s kind of my favorite.

I would like to get 15 short stories into a book form. These are short stories where. I am not a character, but there is a little bit of me in every single one of them.