The Road to Gold Ridge

I’m pleased to announce that I’ve published another short story, this time in the Metaworker. I submitted this story to five magazines back in January and didn’t get any acceptances. But I did get one personalized bit of feedback (thank you, Novel Noctule editors!) that included the following: The writing was solid, but we felt that the ending could have been more impactful. That comment corroborated my own feelings about the story, so I put some more work into it, resubmitted, and then, bam, here we are!

Without spoiling anything, I will say that if you’ve read my story in Lowestoft Chronicle, you’ll find one very obvious common element between these two stories. This was entirely coincidental, and it’s not some schtick that you’ll find in subsequent stories of mine. Having this action in both stories surprised me, and I only added it to this story only as part of my final revisions. I promise I’m not a one-trick pony!

So, please click here and enjoy. And while you’re at it, check out some of the other submissions to the Metaworker. In poetry, I really enjoyed What Do Birds Do When Bombs Go Off by Shah Tazrian Ashrafi and One Day by Rebekah Ricksecker. In prose, I found On Light on Shadow by L.L. Madrid quite moving.

The Story Behind the Story: The inspiration for this was a hodgepodge of different bits of my life. The road is based on Four Mile Canyon in Boulder. I used to live a few dirt roads off Four Mile Canyon, way up in the hills. Because I grew up in Buffalo, New York, I’m an experienced and confident winter driver, but even I disliked coming down that road on the iciest days of winter. It was four miles of twists and turns with steep drop-offs just as I describe in the story. I lived through one and a half winters there and was very ready to leave when I did. “Gold Ridge” is a not so subtle fake name for Gold Hill and the Gold Hill Inn, a charming restaurant and bar way up in the mountains in an old mining town outside Boulder. I’ve been there about a dozen times to listen to bands, enjoy dinner, or just sit with a drink in front of the massive fireplaces. But, while a logical conclusion is that the town the protagonist has moved to is Boulder, I really intended all places in the story, as well as the protagonist and her circumstances, to be fictional.