Long time readers may recall my announcement back in 2016 that my 20,000 word modern noir novella, The Track, was due to be published. After a long delay, however, and a complete failure on the publisher’s part (who shall remain nameless) to reply to repeated queries, I gave it up as a bad job and decided to re-submit the work in the hope of finding a good home for it.
That quest finally succeeded. The story has been accepted for publication by Retreats from Oblivion, the official journal of NoirCon, a biennial conference devoted to noir and its creative expressions. The online journal is run by the Crew: Lou Boxer, Jeff Wong, Cullen Gallagher.
As previously discussed, The Track is about a naive young woman who gets involved in a Ponzi scheme set in a fictional Florida town on the coast. The story gave me a chance to write about Florida, a place I have something of a love-hate relationship with. I like the weather, especially in the winter, endless beaches and surf are two of my favorite things, but there must be something about the place, either too much bright sunshine or some kind of toxins floating around in the air, that seems to drive everyone out of their minds. Given this propensity for deviation and degeneracy and the anything goes atmosphere that almost continuous fine weather provides, the state is a natural breeding ground for criminal behavior. The Track is a career history of an extreme example of the Floridian Flaw, CEO and President of the Centurian Hedge Fund, Jamie Spurgis.
My thanks to the Crew for accepting The Track. I’ll post another announcement when the story’s up. Until then, here’s wishing all of you the very best.