What can we say? Black Lives Matter. Fuck Hate. Fuck Institutional Racism. Fuck Conspiracy Theories. Wear a Fucking Mask. Fucking Vote.
At the end of February, my dad passed away. We lived the ventilator experience about a week before it crushed NYC. We were lucky to be with him the whole time, and lucky to have a large funeral for the man who had been a minister for almost sixty years.
I’ve also been lucky that my job is secure. My family is healthy so far. I’m working from home and I’m getting a lot of reading and writing done. I’ve got a great new writing group who came together for this and have held on to weekly video calls and they’ve prompted me to write a lot of stuff this year.
Some of it has been non-fiction. I wrote one about losing my dad and suffering in general and was lucky to get back into Hobart. Confessions of an Anti-Job.
I have also made the short-list at Bath Short Story Award which had been one of my top goals for the year just to enter. Those results are out August 15th, but the story will appear in their anthology which is awesome and one of my favorite short story collections each year.
I think I’m working on two main things currently. One is a short story collection of longer length works, 2000-6000 words per story as opposed to my more traditional 1000. The second is a new flash-novella that hopefully I could have finished to give Bath Novella In Flash Award another crack. See if third time is the charm getting farther than the atta-boy shortlist.
We still got some of it left, maybe 2020 can be saved. If not, come on 2021.
Al Kratz 