Hey Team! I'm putting a free story up here. PLEASE READ MY POST BEFORE YOU JUMP INTO IT. 

First-why is this one up for all? Partially because I wanted to do a test run on how things work before I put up posts just for Patrons. I wanted to see how things look and if there were any issues.

Second-this isn't a new story. It's old-like from when I was in graduate school old, and it is unlike what I usually write.  It's a very quiet story and there's no magic or anything genre in it. It's not even in my writing style. This story is from a Canadian Literature class that I took where one of the assignments was to write a short story in the style of one of the writers we were studying. I picked Michael Winter, because his book had a very distinct and different approach to dialogue and such. The title, This All Matters, echoes his title, This All Happened.

Third-it's free because, well, it's not as good. There's a lot I like about this story, but I've grown a lot (I hope) as a writer since I wrote this, and it's not really up to the same caliber that you're used to. The characterizations aren't as in depth and so on. So keep that in mind.

Finally-because it has two people that I truly love in this story. First, Maren. I loved Maren, and like Ashely (who first showed up in Death & Waffles, a story I wrote in school) she's made the jump into the universe that my novels are set in. (She shows up in a short story about Frank that's in the anthology Cornered.) Second, Mint Chocolate. When I first moved over to Seattle, I lived in a house called the Monkey House, and we occasionally had bands play and hosted parties. At one party, this guy shows up, and he's smoking in our hallway and he introduces himself as Mint Chocolate. He's about 15-20 years older than everyone there, but he was just such a cool guy that we politely told him that he had to smoke outside but he was welcome to stay.

So anyway, that's what's going on with this story. Hope you enjoy it.

-Lish