Six Sentence Sunday

The first six sentences of my holiday short story (coming soon to an internet near you) also happen to make up its first paragraph:

Jem hated Mariachi music. Its bouncy, overblown beats made him think of cartoon mice hopped up on meth. Speedy Gonzales: The Lost Years. Jem wondered if it made him racist or something, but he decided against it; he hated polka too and he was half-Polish. It was those bouncy Mariachi tunes reverberating through his apartment building, courtesy of one of his neighbors, that chased him all the way from Hollywood to the Santa Monica Pier on that particular afternoon. That was one way of spending his day off.

As one might expect, things of the romantic nature will happen on the pier. The title of the story is Wintertide, and it will appear in a mini-anthology alongside tales from Clare London, Chrissy Munder, JL Merrow, an Josephine Myles.