I am happy to report that I have found homes for two short stories! Neither of these tales is the conventional mini-novel we have come to expect in American letters with the Part I: Hook, Part II: Backstory, and Part III: Resolution.

The first, written in English, is called "Chuey and Me." It is barely five pages long, but took me years to write and rewrite and edit. Why? Because I wanted to pen a tale of friendship severed by substance abuse, but in paragraph long vignettes.

Here was the hard part: half the vignettes go forward in time, and other half go backwards in time. And they alternate. Confused yet?

Yeah. In addition to finding the right episodes per vignette and maintaining some semblance of pacing, which took about two years, I then struggled mightily with form. I tried numbering each graf. I tried the whole * stuff so popular in 2012. I indented the alternating grafs.

I was happy with how the great editorial team at Barren set things up online - WP is a pain in the arse. They also helped get the very last draft over the finish line and clean up the denouement.

Here is a link.

The second story is in Spanish, and Nicaraguan Spanish. In my vain attempt to emulate Manuel Puig and William Gaddis, it is entirely in dialogue form. I wrote it when my Twitter pal Miguel Morales told me about an anthology of writing for the Nicaraguan protesters.

The tale is based largely on an experience from my wife's family during the violent fighting in Managua during the last Civil War, and I wrote it in a handful of days. I submitted it to the anthology, never heard back,tweaked it, and submitted to Azahares, a lit mag that's part of the University of Arkansas.

It blows my mind that I wrote something in December and it got accepted in February and will be published in print and digital in April. The normal turnaround time for the Submittable hustle is much much longer.