Tag: fiction

Three months in

A status report on writing during the first quarter of 2026

From a writing standpoint, 2026 has been a good year so far. As of today (March 31), I’ve had seven pieces published in seven different places. The latest pieces, published Monday and today, are “Scenes from a Chinese Restaurant,” a bit of flash fiction published in luckycreature‘s #MuckyMondays, and “How to Fish,” a short story in Cowboy Jamboree‘s latest issue, a tribute to the late great grit lit writer Lucia Berlin.

Looking ahead, I have acceptances for six more pieces, most of which will be published in April.

So far this year, I’ve submitted to 50 journals. I’ve received rejections from 30 of them, putting me on track to again this year join the 100-rejection club.

Here is everything I’ve had published during the first three months of 2026:

Friday Five: Cowboy Jamboree’s Adam Van Winkle, author of ‘Count the Dust’

‘The idea became intriguing for me: write a play to be read.’

Radio plays have been around for a century or more, practically since the advent of radio. They thrived during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s–an era sometimes called the Golden Age of Radio. In his latest novel, Count the Dust (LEFTOVER Books, December 2025), writer and literary magazine editor Adam Van Winkle taps into that approach to create a distinctive story designed for radio but equally enjoyable as a good read.

Count the Dust is set in a nameless small town in southern Oklahoma or north Texas. It’s modeled after the place where Adam grew up, Texoma, but, as he writes, it could be any of the “many small Oklahoma and Texas towns I’ve been in and through that center around a filling station on a state highway.” It’s a murder mystery, told over two time periods–1967, the year of the murder, and 1997–as well as a story of “the persistence of offspring in unideal circumstances.”

“These places, like places I grew up in and around, with little money, little resources, drugs, guns, violence, strained marriages and poisonous relationships, they still find a way to produce progeny. People still meet through the circumstance of life, new people still get born.”

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