You know, sometimes we go through ups and downs in life and it’s OK to be sad or doubt yourself for a while. I’ve been in a bit of a creative funk for a little while. But you know that’s OK.
Your habits create your mood, and your mood is a filter through which you experience your life.
I was talking with my wife and she asked me what stories I have coming out in the near future. I’m kind of all over the place and I did not realize I actually have three stories coming out in the next month. This afforded me the opportunity to be a little more organized.
Hellbent
This is the story of a man who is wrongly convicted of a crime and what it’s like to be in prison for a crime you didn’t commit. It’s not as gloomy as you think it is. I wanted to write this because I wanted to experience and think about it. Life is not fair and the goals just to make it a little more fair.
This was published in Piker Press, I believe yesterday.
No Picnic In The Park – this is one of my favorite stories. It is chaotic. It is dark and it takes place during wildfire season. Almost the entire story takes place on a picnic bench two blocks for our daughter’s house. I originally wrote this story because wildfires made our daughter’s wedding challenging.. Why the story ended up on the picnic bench near her house. I don’t know. That’s is the randomness in my writing..
This story was published before, but the magazine went out of business. As a sidenote, on that same picnic bench, we signed the mortgage papers for a current house..The name of the publication is The Goldfinch Review . Goldfinch is one of my favorite novels by Donna Taart. It is also the name of the company who is putting in a large window in our house.. That is a tragedy for another day
Ice Cream Sonata for Wind
This story will be published by the Academy for the Heart and Mind. Publication date is scheduled for November 28.. This story is rather crazy.. It is a story of the winds of late November so the publication date is kind of perfect.. ironically this story also takes place in the same neighborhood as the picnic bench. The story is a little off the wall and it’s about an ice cream man whose niche market is selling ice cream during these crazy windy November storms.
This story was born 28 years ago when the power would go out when I first moved to Seattle. I had nothing better to do than light a fire and write letters to my grandmother.
Many years later, I noticed a stack of letters on her dining room table. Almost all of them were from me..
I would love to hear you opinion as well