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Picture of the Day

Sunday
  October 18, 2015

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A few weeks ago, waiting for an emergency bike repair left me with about an hour to kill in an unfamiliar neighborhood. I was pleasantly surprised to find an unaffected dive bar in an area that was rapidly losing its character, a familiar pattern by now in Seattle. What happened next was so distasteful and distressing that I wrote it all down. But in this case, the truth didn't go far enough, so I recast it as fiction with a more satisfying ending. To paraphrase Bukowski: Fiction is an improvement on life. Inspired by Debritto's book on Buk, I've been laying off this website lately, trying to find other outlets for my work. To that end, this morning I emailed the story to an editor of a local blog that has its heart in the right place. Then I went to my usual weekly 4Shadows jam session, which ended with a drizzly stroll through South Lake Union, probably the single neighborhood that most epitomizes the city's rapid change. Checking email when I got home, I was surprised to learn that the story had not only been accepted, it was already posted! As another author said: "Writers get even."  empty space