Hello everyone, and Happy Friday! Here’s an afternoon snack (or maybe a morning or evening snack, depending on when and where you’re reading this) to get your weekend going: the opening paragraph of my new novella, Tryouts – inspired by my attempt to make the varsity basketball team when I was a freshman in high school. It was named a Finalist in this year’s Trifecta Competition sponsored by the Iron Horse Literary Review. My plan is to publish it as a chapbook this spring, hopefully to coincide with the college basketball tournament. Enjoy!

There must have been forty of us, maybe fifty, kids of all shapes and sizes, crammed into that stuffy gym after class, the place reeking of sweat and dirty socks and farts, chattering, fidgeting, roughhousing. It was chaos on that Monday afternoon at three-forty-five, the first day of basketball tryouts, all of us vying for only eleven spots on the varsity team. Some clearly wouldn’t make it, some clearly would. And the rest, like me, fell somewhere in-between.