Mexpocalyptic Honor

Honorary mention

Like the pic shows, my story "Wake Up Gringo" won honorary mention at The Ghost Story 2021 Contest. 

LINK

The editors at The Ghost Story obviously highly evolved, based upon their choice of stories.

I wrote this story in a collection I had planned then nixed involving two characters, The Kid and El Viejo, living in a rural house surrounded by a howling, screeching border as they try to live out a mundane life that mutates and causes them to question the veracity of their existence, that is, are they real folks or trapped in someone's weird narrative which they didn't choose. Such is life for a half-breed quasi-vato in the USA.  I may complete it at some point, but for now, this story is a part of Mexpocalyptic Tales, a slipstream and speculative collection anticipating and reveling in the Mexpocalypse, the nuclear blast of Xicano formation and ascendancy.  A collection closer and closer to launching.

I wrote "Wake Up Gringo" years ago, as often happens with a story's inception to actual publication.  Most writers back in the day would say they wrote it in a lazy day and did no editing and it got published that afternoon.  I respected Julio Cortázar who would say he wrote a draft 20 years ago and then rewrote it for years. 

I recall wanting this story to give the same sense of an early Chicano collection from the 70s where work was rawish, pithy but searching and new.  

It's great to win honorary mention, this is the first time I've placed in a contest and the winner was an Indigenous person.  Now to get some books published...