“Crowntree” is up at Ideomancer!

And yet another story of mine is up to read! Yippee! And it’s at Ideomancer, of all places!

This one has a special place in my heart. It’s based off an actual tree and stone ring I saw in someone’s backyard. Seeing the tree took me back to the days of when I was a kid, and our own backyard.

We lived in a cul-de-sac, and our backyard was adjacent to a trainyard that had a slice of forest serve as a barrier of sorts. Several feet of this forest protruded into our own backyard, so basically we had a lawn with a couple of trees, then a wooded area that had a path going through it, so in a way, it was like our own forest preserve. And in the city of Chicago, that’s pretty special.

Towards the back of our backyard, there was a tree we could climb. It had a space where two or three kids could stand up, and there was even an odd stump that served as a makeshift chair. My sisters and I, and our friends, would go to the backyard and play ‘king of the castle’ and sometimes tell stories (I was doing that even way back then).

Thinking about it now, our backyard was a kid’s paradise.

So fast forward a couple of decades, I’m at a friend’s house for the first time, stuffing Easter eggs. I happen to look into their backyard, and lo and behold, there’s the tree. They also have a strange concrete ring that we couldn’t really figure out what it was used for. My imagination kicked in and “Crowntree” was born.

What’s also cool about this story is that this is the first story that got into the exact place I wanted it to go to. I’ve always been a fan of Ideomancer and their stories, so I made it one of my goals to get a story in to them. It’s quite a prestigious market, and I’m very happy that they chose my story (and the other stories in this quarter’s issue are wonderful too).

Go read “Crowntree” at Ideomancer!

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