"Mighty Casey"

I just finished writing a new story, "Mighty Casey", and am submitting it today to Elysian Fields Quarterly, "the literary baseball journal that is short on hype and long on content." The story is based on the classic old baseball poem "Casey at the Bat" and is told primarily from the perspective of the Mudville team's justifiably frustrated owner.

Though my days of intense fanaticism of the game are long since passed, "Casey at the Bat" will always have a place in my heart--I was able to recite it from memory at age eight, and used to recite it to Maddie at her bedtime. Finishing the story has been a long time in coming, as I first conceived the idea during the Cubs' ill-fated playoff run in 2003, finished the first draft in early 2004 but didn't finally wrap it up until this past weekend.

This one's obviously a special purpose piece, and I really can't think of anyone who would publish it other than EFQ. So if they turn it down I'll probably post it to my Writings page. Which might be a long way off, since EFQ says they take up to nine months to evaluate fiction pieces.