BLACK TIE BLUES

It's the '70's and "perfect little, dutiful, respect-their-elders Chinese girls" are supposed to marry perfect, respect-their-elders Chinese boys, but what happens when that girl isn't really in love with the man she's to marry and her best friend is in love with her? Read "Black Tie Blues" to find out. 10% of the profits from this short story will be donated to the Gary Sinise Foundation's Soaring Valor program. About the Author: Janna Wong was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. After attending local public schools, she earned her Bachelor’s degree in English and Master’s degree in Professional Writing, both from the University of Southern California. Professionally, she has spent her entire life around the written word. As a Lecturer in USC’s Marshall School of Business, she teaches Business Communication courses. She has coached Marshall employees on developing effective presentation skills and has served as a coach for various Marshall MBA programs. In addition, she has been a story analyst for film companies and studios, such as DreamWorks and The Disney Channel; written articles for magazines, such as Los Angeles and Touring America; publicity materials for organizations, such as UCLA Live; edited book manuscripts for publishers on a wide variety of topics; and serves as a researcher and editor for studio press kits on upcoming feature film releases. She has been a paid blogger, writing about casual gaming for Character Arcade, a website owned by USA Network, sports for Blogher.com and Boise Sports Network, and about British film and television for Anglotopia.com. To complement her professional writing experiences, she continues to write creatively. She was accepted into the David Henry Hwang Writers Workshop of East West Players, where she developed several plays, including the one-act, Couplings, which received a staged reading at the theater; and Sweet and Sour, which was a finalist in a New Playwrights Competition at Theater Mu. She also was accepted into the Playwrights Kitchen Ensemble of the Coronet Theater in West Hollywood. Through this association, she developed a full-length romantic comedy, The Girl and the Goon, which resulted in a successful staged reading. Her short story collection, A Life in Yellow-Gold, was performed in the inaugural “Emerging Voices,” a program sponsored by The New Short Fiction Series™ that presents well-written short fiction by unpublished authors. She took those stories and transformed them into a YA novel, Mariana Wong’s Summer of Love, which was a quarter-finalist in Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award competition. She has written two other novels, a romantic-comedy called Let’s Get Lost and an upmarket women’s fiction title, The Girl and the Goon.