Some time ago I decided to add two more short stories to my series on teen age grief at the loss of a parent. I’ve spoken of this series before. Originally it was a single short story. Then I decided to add another, and another. At that point I actually decided to plan out the series, thinking of what additional things I could write about concerning the topic.

About three or four months ago I wrote out the start of the short story in manuscript. I covered two pages of what I call “conference note pad” sized paper. Then it sat while I worked on getting the Thomas Carlyle book out, finishing a novel, and writing and publishing my other recent short story, “It Happened At The Burger Joint”. Once all that was put to bed, I knuckled down and wrote this one. The writing went fairly easy, as I had played the scenes out in my mind. I think it took only two days before I had the full story done, it coming in at about 2,700 words.

At that point I let it sit, for about a week, while I messed around with some other writing tasks. Two days ago I picked it up again, read it and did some edits. Printed it and read it again yesterday. Found a few more edits to make. It seemed to me as good as it was going to get. I created the two files for Kindle and Smashwords, and went ahead and published. Here are the links:

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00L8GDT2G

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/451366

This puts me up to 16 published items, three of them this year. I’m hoping to add three or four more before saying goodbye to 2014.