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Here's the deal, amigorinos: I need to pick short stories for a book I'll be putting out in a couple months as part of a kickstarter campaign. I was going to wait on this until I had all fifty-two stories in the can, but as I need to get to editing right away, I am asking you to help me in the selection process by commenting on which stories you feel absolutely have to make the cut. If you've been following along, I'd love your input.

So far, I've written forty-six stories (one of those was a two-parter, but we'll let that slide), totaling around 106,000 words.

In random order, these are the stories I'm considering for inclusion...

1. Sept. 16: The Hookup (A farm family is changed forever when the internet man comes to town) – 435 words
2. Mar. 26: Spoiled (An author, depressed over perceived failure in writing and relationship, hallucinates and attempts suicide) – 1,705
3. Mar. 11: The Day the Bear Ate Pappy (A tall tale in which brothers go treeplanting to prove their manliness to their father, and end up watching him get ‘et) – 3,245
4. Mar. 4: Blackbird Train (A Vonnegut-esque story in which two people make a connection whilst stuck on a train careening toward derailment) – 3,785
5. Feb. 25: Red Gold (A young tribal boy dies in a conflict brought about when an oil man impregnates his sister) – 2,384
6. Feb. 11: Zaphod (In a Douglas-Adams-esque sci-fi parody, an undercover duck participates in the chicken-takeover of the Universe) – 1,878
7. Feb. 4: Love, In a Taxi (Two lovers are re-united in a taxi, only to plunge – with the driver – to their deaths) – 1,410
8. Aug. 9: A Thinly-Veiled Grey (A third-culture kid goes to a class reunion hoping to show how much things have changed, and ends in a fistfight after being sucked back into his highschool self’s headspace) – 2,056
9. Jul. 29: When Twice Again they Died (The death of a child, told through the eyes of his teddy bear) – 2,157
10. Jul. 22: Hydra (A guy who is death-to-automobiles recovers his stolen car, only to watch it ruined – and the thief killed – in a lightning strike) – 2,008
11. Jul. 15: The Hunt (After shooting a squirrel, a kid finds that the glories of hunting aren’t all he’d dreamed) – 2,266
12. Jul. 8: Plink (An uprooted boy just starting to find joy at his new boarding school is brutally disappointed when the girl he is with has a terrible accident) – 2,223
13. Jun. 24: Muted (A man who’s saved his whole life to buy a farm finds his dreams dashed in one, fateful night) – 1,274
14. Jun. 17: A Grizzly Bear on Columbia Street (A societal satire in which a marauding grizzly bear is ignored until he diverts his attention from a city’s homeless to one of its wealthier denizens) – 2,356
15. May 17: Immortality (A treeplanting superstar saves his brother’s life by sacrificing himself during an encounter with a grizzly) – 4,563
16. Oct. 7: The Apple and the Oak (An apple and an oak tree become friends, and then deal in their own ways with the separation entailed by their mortality) – 1,163
17. Sept. 30: The Strange Case of Benson T. Hueson and the Morning Paper (Everything gets turned around for Mr. Hueson, until his future-telling paper ceases to prognosticate) – 3,084
18. Sept. 9: Bottlecap Billy (An autistic guy, confused about where money comes from, attempts to rob a bank and is tragically killed) – 2,980
19. Sept. 3: Vocation (A painter, frustrated at the perceived failure of a show, destroys his own work) – 1,612
20. Aug. 26: Perspective (A weird, existentialist experiment in which a guy who’d fantasized about the cowboy life dies from being shot in the gut) – 1,528
21. Oct. 21: The Horsefly (A treeplanter eats a horsefly to amuse a young boy, and finds meaning in suffering) –
22. Apr. 15: Loyalty (Some hutterite boys learn a lesson about loyalty, grace and forgiveness while shoveling pig manure as punishment) – 3,146
23. Apr. 29: Exist (In an existentialist, story-within-a-story experiment, a young man gradually realizes that he is a figment of this author’s imagination) – 2,903
24. Oct. 28: Butterball (A streetwise, train-hopping kid returns to his grandparents' house looking for a leg up and instead finds a dog skeleton and a cold reception) – 2,351
25. Apr. 8: Extranjero (A kid gets hit with a stone while freeing fish from a net in Peru) – 1,382
26. Nov. 25: Parabolic (The Good Samaritan on the beach dies saving a Mexican) – 2,320
27. Nov. 10: Sanctuary (A lapsed church attendee walks out of a megachurch for good, after surviving a choking incident) – 1,784
28. Nov. 4: Crossing the Border (A guy discovers his own racism when he goes to Mexico and gets a root canal on the wrong tooth.) – 1,858
29. Dec. 2: Two-Winter’s Fall (A story of elves, in which a boy and a girl shoot the same bird in a time of hunger) – 3,456
30. Dec. 9: Into that Good Night (A high school teacher sacrifices himself to save a student from a shooting) – 2589
31. Dec. 16: It Has No Future but Itself (A treeplanter finds hope, while weathering a storm of affliction, through an unexpected vision on a stormy day) – 2,616
32. Dec. 30: Sliced in Two (A young boy deals with the agony of discovering that the girl he loved is no longer the person she once was) – 1049
33. Jan. 6: The Epiphany (A boy, bored out of his mind in church, gets a welcome reprieve in the form of a whistler, a bat, and an angry bible-swing) – 2,350
34. Jan. 14: Conventional (A politician, two dogs, and a stage manager from the sky collide in this story of angry rhetoric and the downfall of western society) – 3,300
35. Mar. 18: Supernova (An actor is accidentally put in a coma by an extra, who goes to jail for a crime he didn’t really commit) – 3,070

...and these are the stories I'm already planning on cutting.


1. Apr. 1: Fear Itself (A game designer discovers enlightenment after living through a weird alien apocalypse) – 2,822
2. Feb. 18: Obey (A hyper kid is drugged into submission) – 605
3. Jul. 1: Curious George Gets Angry (A satirization of the inaccuracies in children’s literature, based on the characters in the Curious George books) – 729
4. Jun. 3: Pongo (A teenage boy proves himself to his father on a rafting trip in the Amazon) – 6,965
5. May 20: Supernova, chapter 2 (Told from the film star’s perspective as she is waking from her coma) – 1,142
6. May 14: Hoppit: or Just There, Mostly (A mashup of children’s stories, about a rabbit whose wisdom saves his life, but not his brothers’) – 2,892
7. May 6: Cheesecake (Short film script) – 1,519
8. Oct. 14: Shiggles McGee the Biting Tree (A man buys a biting tree to rid himself of squirrels and gets more than he bargained for) – 2,336
9. Aug. 19: Big Fish (A journalist, investigating a shark found in the woods in Maine, uncovers a disturbing story) – 2,524
10. Nov. 18: Open Seating (A server in a restaurant quits because of racist patrons) – 2128

For now, what I'm looking for is fresh eyes in the selection process. Is there a story I'm cutting that you really liked? One I'm thinking of including that you really didn't? If so, please tell me why in the comments. It's hard for me to be objective at this point, so if you can help me out, I surely would appreciate it.

Sincerest thanks,

The Management.