Short Stories, By Phil

Weirdest dream ever: I'm at my graduation residency and I find out that my three published short stories  are being turned into a book.

Which is hilarious, because combined, the three short stories add up to about a 40-page book. (If you throw in "The Montana Project" you could stretch it out to about 65). But the publisher came up with a great way to sidestep that. They made it a very small book -- if you stood the book up it was only two inches tall, enabling them to stretch out what would normally be 40 pages into 224. They also threw in some pictures.

I wasn't thrilled about the bland title -- Short Stories, by Phil. Still, this was great news -- having an already published book looks good on a query letter for my novel.

Unfortunately, in the publishing world things happen at the worst possible times, and the excitement about my collection waned as a sea monster ran amok on the island.

Yet, there's a silver lining -- the Fairfield MFA faculty praised my collection as "having captured the true spirit of the sea monster." This, even though I wrote all the stories before I even knew about a monster.

Wow. And I don't even do drugs.