I am halfway-through my series of edits for my collection of short stories. I want to reread each story at least five times. However, if writing/editing/publishing a story can be compared to enduring a pregnancy (someone somewhere at some point once said that…), the contractions are coming very soon. Comparable to how most expectant mothers think, I humbly assume: for me this baby cannot come too soon. I have been thinking about and playing with these stories, in some fashion, for years now,  and I am already thinking about the next child. (Okay, last analogy….) Once I complete my final edit, I will post a teaser–the first page from each story with a link to the ebook. I truly am excited to see this work, which has suffered the indignity of being all but noticed by most, finally assume form–even if it will be, initially anyway, an ebook.

Here is a teaser snippet from the prelude story:

Every moment that we shared we baptized with the promise of new life—a life that would be understood only by us.  We would recreate a world that would exclude everyone else, thereby making us the only two people remaining.  We would have no choice but to know and to love each other; there would be no room for awkwardness—or there would be all the room in the world.  Either way, the world would be ours, and we would recreate everything and rename all the animals and all the plants and rewrite all the books, so, wherever we looked, we would see proof that we had known and had loved each other.

Synchronicity: as I was working on this story, Neutral Milk Hotel’s “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea” circulated through my playlist:

And one day we will die / And our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea / But for now we are young / Let us lay in the sun / And count every beautiful thing we can see love to be / In the arms of all that I’m keeping here with me.