This year I'm doing a six-week sprint during which I'll write six short stories, each in a different genre. My story about angry ghosts in a historic New England village is completed; I'm now writing a cozy mystery set in Sardinia.

If you sponsor Clarion West through my page, you'll get my short story "Escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse" (a Jewish speculative fiction short story published in the anthology Story Emporium and reprinted in Luna Station Quarterly) sent to you at the end of the Write-a-thon.
Here's a sample from "Escape from the Lincoln County Courthouse":

I'd said barely a word to anyone all the way from New York to Santa Fe, but the cowboy's toothy grin disarmed me. “Where you from, miss?”

"New York," I murmured.

He squinted and shook his head. He couldn't hear me over the rattle of the stagecoach and the clatter of the horses' hooves.

"New York," I yelled. "Mott Street."

His grin widened. In twill trousers, angle-heeled boots, and dented black Stetson, this fellow was a city boy’s dream of a New Mexico cowboy. So I gaped when he said he'd grown up on Stanton Street, just down the block from my late grandfather's shul on the Lower East Side. He knew Semmel's on Orchard. And the candy store on Delancey. 

"Billy McCarty, miss." He raised his big black hat an inch.

"Shulamit Pelz."

The man beside him -- stout, red-faced, traveling with a metal strongbox tucked between his feet -- leaned forward. “T.F. Coburn,” he barked. "You one of those mail-order brides, Miss Pelz?”

I blushed and defiantly raised my chin. Tall, bony, and sharp-tongued, I was nobody’s idea of a bride. But tonight I'd step off this stage in someplace called Lincoln in the New Mexico Territory and meet a fiancé I'd never seen. At my feet sat a carpetbag stuffed with my not-very-worldly possessions and on top of our stagecoach a massive trunk held my golem. Zayde Kupperman's golem. The golem was why I was fleeing New York.

2024 Write-a-thon

Tobias Buckell and Nisi Shawl on stage at Town Hall Seattle during the 2022 Summer Reading Series.

Participants are listed in alphabetical order by first name. You may want to confirm with your writer to find out if they are using their public name, a nickname, or a pseudonym.

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Click the button below and complete the donation form. In the “Comment” field list each writer you wish to sponsor and the total amount per writer. Your sponsor split should add up to your total donation and will tell us how to distribute your donation acknowledgments. Alternatively, you can send a check with a note by post to Clarion West, P.O. Box 31264, Seattle, WA 98103-1264.

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