"Freewheeling"

Old story, new story. Last year I wrote a brief 660-word piece called "Freewheeling" that consisted primarily of a conversation between a rabid music fan narrator and the frontman of his favorite band. It was promptly declined by both Drexel Online Journal and 3 A.M., for which I should have hardly been surprised. It was dialogue and not much else. I simply let the story languish and moved on to numerous other projects, almost completely putting it out of my mind.

Then on Saturday, I was at the Joliet Public Library leafing through back issues of Punk Planet when I discovered that the esteemed magazine publishes a short (less than 1,500 words) fiction piece in each issue. (I should have thought of this much sooner, especially since they're now an imprint of Akashic Books with four titles in print, most notably Joe Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned.) And it clicked--here was a punk/indie bible looking for short fiction, and here was me with this half-baked short piece about punk rock fandom. So the other day I fleshed out the story, nearly doubling its length and adding backstory on the narrator which explains much of his mindset from the original version. I just mailed it off to Punk Planet. The story is nothing earth-shattering, but it has its moments--and if anybody is going to publish it, it's them.