Want to read my short story?

I’ve finished the writing sample I’ve been working on for the workshop application, and the app is now paid and sent. This is the first story I’ve sent out into the world in a few years, so it feels like a big deal to have completed it. As I said a few posts ago, it’s a reworking of an old story, one I wrote three years ago for my second writing workshop at UCLA. I’ve improved it quite a lot. It’s still not a great story, but it’s got some decent elements, and I’m happy to find that my writer’s eyes have matured greatly since 2007. Without going into the details, I find myself able to like this story while simultaneously perceiving what I’d like to change about it, and knowing more or less how I’d go about it if I had more time. I can see my writing with more perspective now than I used to, and that’s a major step.

In keeping with this perspective, I’m opening the story up to you here — also a significant step, since I’m more secretive about my fiction writing than probably any other creative work I do. I am open to feedback (either in the comments or via email), if you like, but I’m mostly putting this out there in the spirit of sharing and openness, since obviously I’m not going to be doing any revising while we’re in Hong Kong! 🙂

(The self-portrait is of the same vintage as the first version of this story, btw. Because I’m chronologically picky like that.)

I’m not counting on being able to update this blog at all in the next week, but rest assured that if I get a chance, I will — and in the meantime I will be writing and drawing all my foreign impressions in the fabulous travel journal Undercover Street made for me (which, arrrgh, I haven’t been able to photograph all day because of the downpour)! So I’ll have LOTS to share when I get back!

See you in mid-April!