"Guaranteed"

My flash fiction story "Guaranteed" has been published by Spillway Review. This one is a long time coming, on several fronts.

I first wrote the story in early 2004, as an entry for the Summer 2004 issue of The First Line, where it was declined. (Interestingly, this is the third story I've originally written for TFL which has subsequently been published elsewhere, the others being "The Fixer" and "Can't Be Happy Today, But Tomorrow".) I then shopped the story around to a few more venues before coming across Spillway, a New Orleans-based journal which actively seeks flash fiction. But my timing was less than impeccable, for I submitted the story just a few days before Hurricane Katrina hit. Not surprisingly, the journal's editorial functions were seriously impaired, and the story wasn't accepted until this past January, and with their publication schedule being thrown out of whack, they didn't publish their next batch of flash fiction until just this month. Whew.

"Guaranteed" was one of the first stories I wrote after finally getting serious about writing fiction, and I'm quite pleased to see it published at last.