short story tagged posts

Yesterday I did something I have not done in ages: submitted a short story to a science fiction magazine. The story, however, was not mine: it was my late friend Cappy Hanson’s last work, “The Otter’s Stone.” A few days before she died, she told me which magazine she intended to send it to first, so that was where it went. There’s no guarantee the magazine will accept it, so I’m not going to name it.

Submitting a work, whether to a magazine, a contest, a literary agent, or an editor at a publishing house is an action that readers are blissfully unaware of, but one fraught with tension for the author. There’s no reason why readers should be aware, of course, but for the author it’s a major milestone.

The first step on the roa...

I had been looking forward to reading this collection of short stories for literally over ten years. I was first introduced to it via one of its stories, “Are You Too Late or Was I Too Early,” while taking classes for my Master’s Degree in the mid-2000s. That brief story, with its never-saw-it-coming twist ending, enchanted me. And Ray Bradbury, my all-time favorite author, wrote the introduction. How could I not enjoy the other 49 stories?

Well, it turns out that the book in total, and the individual stories, were less than I had hoped. To be clear, John Collier was a very skilled writer. Even though the stories were all written in the 1930s and 1940s (the book was first published in 1951), each one is tight and clean, not a word wasted...