Thursday, October 8, 2009

The One That Started It All

It's been a busy week, with lots of papers to grade, plus my left pinky finger is badly swollen from, of all things, a kickball accident. (My 10-year-old daughter is one tough kickballer!) You never realize how much you need your lefthand pinky until you start trying to type--ouch! Especially that shift key.

Anyway, this is my apology for not posting anything for a while, and my explanation for why today, rather than posting something brand new, I'm going to link you up to an old story of mine. This was the first one I published after returning to fiction, so it holds a special place in my heart. Alas, the online journal in which it appeared folded after a year, but they kept their archives intact, so the link should still work. Online publishing is great in one respect; your work becomes available to a far wider and more diverse audience than with the print journals. But online periodicals, being relatively easy to start, are also relatively apt to fail, and that's just what happened with this one.

So in any case, here's the story, "Keynote." In his acceptance letter, the editor likened this story to the works of Chekhov. (Maybe that's why the journal failed.) But still, it was quite an ego boost for a guy who hadn't written short fiction for nearly two decades to be told his works could be mentioned in the same sentence as one of the acknowledged masters of the form.

Enjoy!

No comments:

Post a Comment