Just realized I forgot to mention a sale: my short story “Into the West” will be appearing in InterGalactic Medicine Show later this year.  It will be my eighth appearance in IGMS. I originally wrote the story for the 2008 Codexian Idol Contest (a motivational contest run by CodexWriters.com.)  It took second place behind a marvelous story by my friend and Odyssey classmate Krista Hoeppner-Leahy.

“Into the West” is an apocalypse story, in which the laws of physics have undergone an abrupt and unexplained change. Here’s the text of the first manuscript page:

According to Jorge, sometime after we pass through Denver the California Zephyr will run out of diesel. Jorge’s already decided that when the train stops, he will, too–like a captain going down with the ship. He’s got a wife and a passel of kids back in Chicago who he’ll probably never see again, so I guess I understand.

Me, I plan to keep heading west with as many of the other passengers as care to go. Just keep on going till we drop dead of exhaustion or hit the Pacific or the darkness catches us.

We don’t know for a fact that anyone back east is dead. Or alive, either. Some of the passengers just sit up in the dome car and watch the landscape behind us stretch like salt-water taffy as it reddens and finally fades into the blackness that…


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