Telling Ghost Stories About Late Capitalism

I’m putting the finishing touches on a new Short Fiction Lab release this week, going through the story draft and making last minute tweaks and squinting at the title from different directions to make sure it’s right. The cover for this one is already done, so it will be a pretty quick production process one I’m satisfied with the story text and the author’s note.

The new story is actually a very old one, in some respects. It’s a ghost story, of a sort, involving lonely roads and two people who may not be in love anymore, and what happens when a road trip goes all kinds of wrong. I wrote a very early draft of it back in 2007, but it never seemed to fit together right.

Over the years I’ve pulled it out and tinkered with it dozens of times, taking it in different directions. This version…well, it started by going back to the very first draft I ever wrote and rebuilding it from scratch. Teasing out metaphors I’d only hinted at, bulwarking the central parallel I was drawing between being stuck in a relationship going wrong and being caught between life and death.