“Like Good Luck and Love” May Be Found at Thirty West’s Elevator Stories

One of my favorite stories (that I’ve written, and now published) this year, “Like Good Luck and Love,” has just been posted online at Thirty West Publishing House’s “Elevator Stories” imprint.

I love the full concept of the Elevator Stories. Each level has a different theme (the first two being Heaven and Hell, and I’m not sure what comes next). So it’s kind of like you get on the elevator at a particular level to find yourself with a bunch of writers/stories as fellow passengers. The killer concept in this setup is that not only do you find the texts from all the stories, but each story also provides a recording of itself being read — in essence providing you, the rider on your way to another level, with a perfect little moment for a fairly quick “elevator pitch” in the form of a short story (this is my interpretation, anyway; I bow to the Thirty West editors for more definition and clarity).

For what it’s worth, Like Good Luck and Love came to me after our favorite cat of all time died last year. We had to put him to sleep because he had heart problems. He was a troublemaker and a half and quite a rascal. Very likely he had spent his first six months as a wild kitten in the fields and woods near our house before wussing out and begging us to take him in before it got too cold.

Cats wind up getting a lot of play in my work. Not sure why. If you see writing as a mental sort of funhouse mirror, maybe cats are what show up when a dog (half-dog anyway) is doing the conjuring and the coding and the looking in the mirror.

Make sure you don’t just read my piece. All of the writing at Thirty West is excellent. I’m truly looking forward to listening to all the stories as well as I make dinner over the next few evenings.

Go here: https://www.thirtywestph.com/elevatorstories to see all the stories on all the levels. At the time that I am writing (early fall, 2020) there are two levels — 0 is Hell, 1 is Heaven. “Like Good Luck and Love” is on the Heaven level.

Writer's Rule #43.4: "Always bow to the definition, clarity, and focus of editors. They will generally tend to be more objective and benignly ruthless than the writer could ever be."