Tag: short stories

Saturday Special from the Vaults: The Minstrel

This week, another early story of mine. This is one of the earliest stories I sold, to a long-defunct Canadian children’s magazine called JAM. In fact, it was the cover story, and if I ever figure out where I put the magazine I’ll post the cover art here. It’s of roughly the same era as …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: Follow a Song

Last Saturday I posted the opening to the first novel I wrote, when I was 14 years old. This week we jump ahead four or five years to when I was attending Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas (that’s a photo of the library). This story, “Follow a Song,” was a winner in the school’s annual …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: Janitor Work

This was one of the first, if not the very first, science fiction short stories I ever sold. It appeared in the 1984 Canadian Children’s Annual, the year I turned 25. The photo of the lunar surface is from Apollo 17. Darryl Norton looked glumly at the dust-covered object before him.  It seemed to him …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: Sins of the Father

OK, this is an interesting one. As I have often recounted, Marseguro, which won the 2009 Aurora Award for best Canadian science fiction novel in English, began with a single opening line penned as a morning exercise in the Writing With Style program at the Banff Centre, in a science fiction-writing class taught by Robert …

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Saturday Special from the Vaults: Picking the Bones

This is an unpublished and, as far as I know, never-submitted short-short I rediscovered in my files. I think I may have written it at Banff during the Writing With Style workshop on writing science fiction with Robert J. Sawyer, the same workshop out of which came Marseguro. The landing pod settled in the middle …

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My short story in Space and Time

My short story “Waterlilies” has finally appeared in Space and Time Magazine, which bought it months and months ago (as is obvious by the bio, which refers to my seven-year-old daughter–that would be the one who just turned nine). Anyway, it’s nice to see it in print, my name up in lights–well, on the cover, …

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Short story sale, and an end to Warhol!

I just had an email tonight that I’ve sold a short story, “Waterlilies,” to Space & Time Magazine. Yay! It’s the humorous tale of an artistic nanotech apocalypse. (No, seriously!) And another big Yay!, plus a sigh of relief: tonight I emailed my children’s biography of Andy Warhol to Enslow Publishers. I had to put …

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I’ve put another short story online!

It’s “The Wind,” which appeared in Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction, Issue 11, which, according to their website, was the final print edition of the magazine. In other words, I killed it! I hope it doesn’t come back to haunt me… You can read “The Wind” here. (The background art for the image …

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One thing ends, new things begin

Why, yes, I haven’t been posting much beyond my columns: thanks for noticing! It seems like since I got back from the Canadian Chamber Choir tour I’ve been either too busy or too tired to do much beyond the occasional blog post. But perhaps that can change now that I have finished one thing and …

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A nice mini-review of my story The Wind…

…turned up at G-Pop: The Wind by Edward Willett brought back memories of another ghostly tale by none other than Edgar Allen Poe, entitled The Tell-Tale Heart. At first you feel some sympathy toward this man who, once happily married and at home in his childhood home, finds himself alone, his wife gone and his …

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My story now out in Dark Wisdom

I’ve received my author’s copy of Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction with my short ghost story “The Wind” in it, back to back (as it happens) with a story by my fellow SF Canada member Douglas Smith. Other authors with short stories in this issue include Alan Dean Foster, John Shirley, Robert Dunbar, …

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Story coming out in Dark Wisdom

Dark Wisdom: The Magazine of Dark Fiction, Issue 11, is “now at the printer” and includes a short story by me entitled “The Wind.” I’m pleased but somewhat surprised by this development, since I emailed the magazine a couple of times trying to find out the status of the story: it was accepted, but the …

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