As I said last week, two of my stories were published between Christmas and New Year’s. The stories were “The Online Auction” and “Loss” (the one I wrote about last week). Now, I’m writing about “The Online Auction,” which was published by Chicago Literati.
“The Online Auction” is a flash fiction about a woman selling her ex-husband’s comic collection. It was written during the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop in 2012. The prompt was an eBay auction where a man was selling his ex-wife’s wedding dress by modeling the dress himself (a true story).
Like “Loss,” this story has some autobiographical elements, mainly the state of my comic book collection. There are full long boxes in at least four rooms with single issues I have yet to read in the living room. At the time of the workshop, I believe it was only two rooms with long boxes. Two other stories were also influences. The jilted woman selling her husband’s expensive sports car or, like in High Fidelity, his LP collection for $50 was obviously an influence (though none of these are true). The other story I thought of was one Mark Waid told at a comic con where in a divorce he was only able to take whatever he could fit into a U-Haul. (I doubt Mark will ever read “The Online Auction,” but if he did, I hope he would be cool with it, as I didn’t change up much of his anecdote.)
One funny note: some of the misspellings were not quite on purpose. At the workshop, writers had to read a story that they wrote. I was trying to decide between “The Online Auction” and another flash fiction that has yet to be published. Since I pictured the narrator with a Southern accent, I made changes to help me with the accent. This also included switching “your” to “yore.” I reversed some of these but didn’t change others before I started submitting it. I’m not sure what the editors thought, but they accepted it without suggesting any changes. Rereading it, the mistakes seem to work for an eBay auction.
Please give it a read if you haven’t. I hope you enjoy it.
Later,
Phill
Future Imperfect 