Currently Working On: Made sure to get a few words on the page for my manuscript but mostly worked on a storyboard for Surprisingly Supernatural. The world I'm creating has a life of its own and it's trying to outgrow my brain!
Rejected! Yup, that's the theme for this morning. Four out of the six magazines I submitted my short story to have declined my submission. It sounds bad but really, it was expected. If it was easy to get published, everyone would be doing it. In the words of Eric Cartman, "That's life. If you want to find a friend you have to wade through all the dicks first."
Excerpt from my short story, Accidents Happen
My father was in prison. At least that’s what I thought at the time.
The August sun baked the black asphalt parking lot into a hazy wave of heat and noxious chemicals that rolled up from the ground to combine with the stagnant air, making my throat burn. The forecast called for rain in the evening but the sky was unfortunately devoid of clouds.
“How much longer?” I asked in my seven-year-old’s voice. My persistently sunburned arms stinging in the absence of shade.
“Not much longer. Then we’ll eat lunch at that picnic table right there,” my mother said, pointing to the heavy wrought-iron table just on the other side of the fence.
I couldn’t imagine why there would ever be a fence like that with my father on the other side. Like the fences holding back vicious predators in the zoo. Tall and ugly and barbed on an angle at the top. A uniformed guard stood watch at the one narrow gated opening. The gate may have been a comfort to me, a sign that my father would be able to leave. But it wasn’t. My mother told me the fence was to keep bad people out, not to keep my father in. But the fence was towering and sharp and the guard had a gun and a snarl that matched the fence’s jagged lines. My mother expected me to go willingly and quietly inside the fence. To agreeably cross over from gentile public to caged animal for the sake of a stale, sweaty bologna sandwich and fifteen minutes with my father. That was the last thing on earth I wanted to do. It was before I learned there were much worse places in the world to be trapped than the industrial courtyard of the factory where my blue-color father labored away his life assembling engines
