I've been at this writing thing a long time-- I first began writing stories when I was about sixteen. My 10th-grade English teacher, Mr. Norman Haider, assigned us the task of rewriting A Separate Peace, by John Knowles, from the point of view of Finny, the second character.

I was inspired, and began writing short stories a while later. I took creative writing classes at the University of Pennsylvania, but nothing was published, even in the college literary magazine.

After I graduated from business school in 1983, I bought a Commodore 64 computer for its word-processing capabilities, and entered the computer generation. But still, nothing was worth publishing, though I was sending stuff out all the time. My best result was a story called "Trenton Makes," which was named one of the top 50 stories in a Redbook magazine fiction contest. It's a sweet story, never published anywhere, about a recent college graduate who meets a girl at his cousin's bar mitzvah.

It wasn't until I began writing gay erotica that anything got published-- and back then, I was confused and/or in the closet, so I published under the name Dirk Strong. I couldn't really tell anyone they were my stories at first, but I did make $75.00 each, and they were fun to write. It was exciting to get something in print after trying for so long.

These are the stories from that period, though I don't have the exact publication dates for some:

"The Building Inspector," Honcho, June 1987 "The Cop Who Caught Me," Honcho, September 1987 Both these stories were inspired by my life in Albany-- working on the Pyramid Crossgates Mall construction site, and driving the Taconic Parkway back and forth to New York.

• "Showerroom Fuck" in Jock, March 1988
• "Turn-On Train," In Touch for Men
• "Lust Train," Gallery's Feedback section
• These last two stories are essentially the same, about an encounter between two people on an overnight train in Europe. In the first, the characters are both guys, while in the second the characters are a guy and a girl.

I actually sold a bunch of other stories at this time, but because of editorial changes at magazines they didn't get printed. I finally found a venue for two of them, a website called Gay Link Content, which licensed them to various gay sites.

• "From the Bedroom to the Darkroom"
• "Working It Out"

I published three other newer stories there, too. The last two were inspired by my work at abc distributing, where I had to take a drug test in order to be hired, and where I worked in a big empty warehouse for a while.

• "A UPS Guy Who Delivers"
• "The Specimen"
• "At The Warehouse"

Finally, I attended a writer's workshop at LIU-Southampton where I studied with Russell Banks, fresh from his success with Continental Drift. I had been living in Miami for a little under a year, and already South Florida had started to get under my skin. He assigned us a series of short exercises-- describe a person, describe a place, and so on. One of those was to think of a place your character would never go, and then think of a reason that would make him or her go there.

I wrote about this biker bar in Key Largo called The Caribbean Club, which allegedly had appeared in the Bogart & Bacall film To Have and Have Not. I kind of wanted to go there, because of the Hemingway connection, but I knew that wasn't going to happen. When I finally put all those exercises together, I ended up with a short story called "Angel Dust." I submitted it to a short story contest being run by South Florida magazine (now sadly defunct). I won! At last, a story in a mainstream magazine! Of course, they edited the hell out of it,] without asking me, and even changed the name to "My Cousin's Keeper." And I don't think they even paid me. From then on, I started publishing short stories in magazine and anthologies. The stories from that period are:

"Holding On" in Vox, fall 1992 (an FIU student literary magazine) "The Cat in the Bouquet" as "A Christmas Wedding" in The Cat Came Home For Christmas mini-mag, 1995 The Cat Who Went North - The Cat Who Loved Christmas mini-mag, 1994 "At The Diner" - In The Family magazine, Winter 2003

• "Japanese Time" at Verbsap. Well, this story isn't exactly new; I wrote the first draft of it over twenty years ago. I attended the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference three times-- in 1979, 1982, and 1992, though this story probably came out of my first or second trip there, hanging out around the piano in the barn. It wasn't until recently, though, that I really knew what to do with it. The editor at Verbsap was great at helping me figure out exactly how to make it work.
  
• "Rashomon at Green Park Tube Station" originally published at Subterraneans.com, a short-lived gay and lesbian literary website run by Angela Faith Brown. This is a very different type of story for me, very experimental in form. It takes its inspiration from the movie Rashomon, by Akira Kurosawa, in which the same event is described by different people who witness it.