Esquire Magazine Short Fiction Smackdown - I'm a Finalist (!?)

Sometimes worlds are just bent on colliding. 

This man can write.

To my great surprise (and bewilderment, frankly), I've just been informed that I'm a finalist in Esquire Magazine's short-short fiction contest, administered by The Aspen Writers' Foundation. The lovely prize is a day and night in New York--the day spent partly in a workshop with the superb writer Colum McCann (!! Ta tu go hiontach !!), and the evening at the Esquire Penthouse in Brooklyn, where the ten finalists will first be made drunk, and then pitted against one another in a ring for a fight to the death with genuine medieval knives, flails and axes...no, no, that's too easy. We'll actually be competing before a live audience of literary heavyweights, and trying hard to invest our short-short-short stories with appropriate gravitas. And I do mean short: as this is Esquire's 78th anniversary party, our stories had to be exactly 78 words long. The survivor winner gets a truly awesome prize: an expense-paid week at the Aspen Writers' Foundation summer festival & workshop. In Aspen. That's Aspen, Colorado. Where the foothills are taller than anything in Massachusetts.

The funniest part is that Esquire is flying me straight from the World Fantasy Convention in San Diego, where I'm headed on Thursday. In the space of 36 hours I'll go from discussing enchanted pirate ships to Proust.

I would love to share my immortal words with you here--I could put it in 36-point bold and not fill your screen--but it is the property of Esquire now, and I'm secretly hoping it will appear next to a photo shoot of Elena Anaya in a future issue. Pray for me.

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Update: pictures of the Esquire party pad here. It'll do.