One of my main reasons for retiring early from UC Berkeley (at least a decade before most of my colleagues would consider stepping down from work that was meaningful, respected and lucrative) was to have more time for writing. And when we arrived in Amsterdam in the fall of 2018, I began working more seriously on various writing projects.
In these last few years, I’ve had several essays and one poem published in literary magazines, but today my first short story, “Toothache”, has appeared in the online magazine Fiction on the Web.
“Toothache” tells the (semi-fictionalized) story of my father’s life. (He died of an untreated dental abscess.) I wrote the first draft in under a day, and then spent two years in continual revisions, expanding, cutting back, rewriting, until it finally reached this form. Little did I know how difficult it would be to get a short story published. Much harder than getting a grant from the National Science Foundation, or the National Institutes of Health, or the Department of Energy, all of which funded my research for years.
Please do read the story, and if you like it, then share it with your friends. Fiction on the Web is entirely open, no subscription needed. The story will appear on the front page of the magazine for a few days, after which you’ll need to retrieve it by searching under my name.