It's Up!!

My collection of short stories and poems is up and available for immediate download!!  I will now share with you the foreword I wrote for the book and I will give the link to the book at the bottom of this post.  Thank all of you so very much for reading and for your support!

Foreword From the Author:

            It’s around 9:30 a.m. on a random weekday morning.  I’m at Aroma Café in Studio City and I’m doing what I’ve been doing here the last few months on random weekday mornings, which is working on the book you now hold in your hands.  Oh, and drinking coffee.  Lots of coffee.

            My first self-published book was a fiction romantic comedy of sorts, so one might wonder why I felt it necessary to venture into the realm of short stories and poems next.  The answer simply is that I love stories.  I think we all do.  Whether we hear them in our favorite songs, movies, or television shows.  Mankind has had a fascination with storytelling since the beginning of time and I am no different.

            For as long as I can remember, using my vast imagination and writing stories has been my favourite way of expressing myself.  When I was a teenager, my favourite place to be was in a coffee shop with a notebook and a pen.  I would sit and look around at different people, trying to imagine where they had just come from or where they were going to next, what it was they were working through in their lives at that moment, and like a photographer out in nature, I would often get lost in them.  I wanted to capture those moments on paper in the form of words for others to see and interpret. 

            I’ve kept a good number of the notebooks I carried with me from high school and college.  I dug into them to gather stories and poems for this collection.  A majority of them were too melodramatic for my tastes now, but a few still hold some truth for the person I am today, and those few you will find revamped, edited, and included here.

            There was also a period when I gave myself a 30-Day Challenge to complete 1 short story each day.  I completed 15, not the whole 30, but it was still enough to render some of what you’ll find here.

            These poems and short stories are not necessarily complete on their own, but rather, they are seeds I am planting in the soil that may someday grow into a greater narrative for another book I have yet to write and hopefully one that you have yet to read.

            And so it is with great pride and joy that I present to you my first collection of short stories and poems.

With many thanks and so much gratitude,

Leslie Li Hikida

Excerpt from You + Me: A Collection of Short Stories & Poems

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HKSLKHW