Good News and Bad News

It's been a few weeks, and I have good news a bad news. I also have a LOT of personal strife going on which I will not get into here.

Anyway, the good news is that one of my stories was published recently. This was "An Unlucky Day" and I'll post the link in a minute. I first wrote the story in a Creative Writing class as an undergraduate in the 1990s. I always liked the story, and it was one of the first items I ever sent to a literary journal. Although it was rejected, even in its first submission, I was given encouragement to the send the publication more of my work. I sent it out about another half dozen times to various publications, and never heard a peep until it sold in February.

I also changed the ending about five hundred times. Ok, it was probably more like 5, but it felt like a lot more. The trouble was part of the assignment was NOT to write an ending, something I was unsure of at first, but the professor explained that it was because students often concentrate too much on the endings of their stories. It did help me concentrate more on developing the characters and the story itself, which is why I believe he wanted us to do it that way. But then I graduated, and if that story was ever going to be published, it needed an ending. I was trying to come up with a more literary ending, but it was a bit of a dark comedy. Finally, I decided to just give it the ending people would expect out of it, and finally it sold.

So without further ado, here's "An Unlucky Day" at Page and Spine.

Then there's the bad news: I did not get into the graduate school PhD in English program I wanted. :-(

Such is life I suppose. I'm not exactly sure why I was not accepted because I only received a form letter. I have two theories though. One is because I don't have any research credits (although I do have a few fiction credits). But then the question becomes, how do you get research credits outside of a PhD program, and how do you get into a PhD program without research credits. My other theory is that academia is beginning to think I'm too old. I hope it was the former and not the latter. Tata for now.