After a quarter of a century, my 5,000-word story Mixing Tracks, written for an undergraduate fiction class at Harvard, is coming out as a chapbook! Mixing Tracks won the 2008 Gertrude Press Fiction Chapbook Award for LGBT writers and is now available on their website at http://elizabethsimson.com/gertrudepr....

Why did it take until 2007 for the story to get published, when guest edgy editor Peggy Munson (author of Origami Striptease) picked it up for Suspect Thoughts? Was it that it was written by a woman from the point of view of a man who is in love with another man? Was it that the adult male protagonist has the hots for a youth who may or may not be under-age? Was it that the seventeenth submission really is the charm?

Whether you want this 22-page book as one-handed reading, proof that persistence pays off, or so you can claim you have read it before you try to get it banned from your local library, don't wait. Fewer than a hundred copies are still available at http://elizabethsimson.com/gertrudepr... for the low, low price of $8.00. They'll make great stocking stuffers or party favors -- if you live in the Castro.