The further adventures of Evelyn and Jason

If you've read my eBook short story collection, Kiss Shot, you'll remember the characters Evelyn and Jason from "I Got A Name." In that story, Evelyn is a morbidly obese woman looking for love in all the wrong places, including a community theater group. Jason is the young, gay man she reluctantly befriends and discovers that they not only have music in common, but are outsiders in the small Southern town of Cottonwood.

Evelyn and Jason are back in a new story, "The Summer Affair," which will be published in the next issue of Sibling Rivalry Press's fiction journal Jonathan. In this outing, Evelyn and Jason are taking night classes at Cottonwood Community College and receive an invitation to a dinner party being hosted by classmate Kara. The party spirals out of control as secrets are revealed, including Jason's bedding of Kara's ex-boyfriend, Evelyn's misplaced crush on Jason, projectile vomiting, a malfunctioning steam cleaner and a Japanese exchange student who may or may not be Kara's sex slave.

Expanding the Cottonwood universe into a novel of connected stories will be my next project after The Venus Trilogy is complete. I'm excited about exploring this town and the wacky characters who inhabit it. If you haven't read Kiss Shot, head over to the Amazon store and download it to your Kindle or computer. It's only 99 cents. And you can pre-order Jonathan featuring "The Summer Affair" at this link right now. The issue also features short fiction by Nathan Alling Long, Eric Karl Anderson, John M. Bonanni, Jon McDonald, Matt Dean, Mike Kaspar, Jeff Mann, Jonathan Sanford, and Lou Dellaguzzo.