Short Story Collection - Foreword

 

I’ve thought about doing a collection of my short fiction for a long time. Never got around to it for various reasons. I’ve always been more comfortable with novels, and wrote stories for the magazines because that was how one broke into the field, back in the day. Sell some, use those to get an agent, write a novel, get that in front a book publisher, that was the standard route, when I was still young, before the internet.

Fifty years ago.

Ray Bradbury, in The Zen of Writing, said if you wrote a short story a week for twenty years, you’d get pretty good at it. 

I can do that, I thought.

I was wrong. 

I cranked out one a week for forty weeks, then crashed—I was no Ray Bradbury. (And he didn’t write a story a week for thirty years, either.) Trying did put me into the magazines after a few months—along with three hundred rejections that first year.

Early on, I sold but one in four, and the rest went into a file drawer, to be mined for ideas later. Or maybe another shot at them when I had a few more chops.

When I started writing books, I stopped writing short stories. Didn’t have the time, and what it cost to do one was more work than a chapter in the novel-in-progress, and worth less money anyhow. For me, it’s a harder form, the shorter stuff.

However: The odd—sometimes very—odd idea for a story would sprout up unbidden and unwanted from the swampy sedge grass in my brain—usually when I was on a novel deadline with no time for such foolishness—and these wild weeds demanded that I pluck them. I’d write a draft in a white-heat, touch it up, send it off, and because  these seemed passing strange to me, I never expected any of them to sell.

Almost all of them sold—which surprised me no end. 

So, they’ve piled up. 

Anyway, in the middle of the work-in-progress novel, this idea sprouted:

Time to do a short story collection.

So …

What you have here is a representative selection of my short works, most of them published elsewhere, a few never seen by the general public. Relatively-new, though that’s, well … a relative term. 

Herein are twenty-two stories, just under 70,000 words, from short-short to novelette-length—science fiction, fantasy, fairy tales, martial arts, sex, mayhem, and even a couple set in other writers’ universes, rated PG to R, with dabs of NC-17 hither and yon.

Most of these, I consider character-pieces, which I have come to enjoy doing more than those that are plot-driven. More introspection, less action, but that’s what calls to me, so those are the ones I have mostly showcased. There are some thump-and-bump stories, too.

I’ve added a short afterword at the end of each story. Some folks find these interesting.

I hope you find things here that will amuse, make you think, even be a little shocked when you read them.