So over the Summer, right after I finished my novel, while we were in the lull period on the Post, I spent a month really focusing on short fiction. I've always loved writing short stories, and had never really had much success getting them published. In fact, aside from publications I worked for, I'd had a grand total of two stories published in about five years of trying. So imagine my surprise when the dam burst over the Summer—I wrote five stories, and all of them got accepted for publication at the journal or magazine I was targeting.

The first I already linked to—a short short called "A Biography of the Ave" that was published in Book by Authors, a nonprofit fundraiser collection to help benefit North Long Beach.

This story I'm more excited about, and I hope you have a chance to read. It's called "Alone and Awash on the Queen Mary," and it's a literary ghost story that (like everything I'm writing now) is focused with a local angle. It was published a short while ago at Verdad Magazine, and I just found out it won the Editors' Choice for the Fall 2009 issue (since there are a few other writers in the fiction section this quarter that I'm competitive with, I was doubly happy about that). Anyway, it's a fun story that I'm very happy to have written, and now, to be able to pass along to you to read—enjoy!

Click here to read the story.

Labels: Stories