Over the past five years I’ve written sixteen short stories, covering a variety of genres: science fiction, spy/espionage, fantasy, horror. They’re between 5,000 and 15,000 words each, and usually deal with an individual or group of individuals facing either a seemingly-impossible task or having to deal with some insanely impossible phenomenon that shouldn’t quite exist but does. I think the strongest part of my stories, and the parts that I enjoy the most when writing, are the characters, how they become fleshed out mainly through dialogue that seems to come from their lips and not my typing fingers.
Originally I had the goal of writing two short stories a month, then one a month, but as you can tell, that’s a constantly shifting and perhaps too-lofty goal. Most of the stories were written between the tail end of 2002 and the beginning of 2005. In the three years since I’ve spent my energy on writing and rewriting a new novel and rewriting a draft of another one I wrote in 1999. I have a lot of ideas on the corkboard behind my desk, so I’d like to get back in the habit of writing short stories. I think they’re the best and first necessary step to getting longer work published.
Today and tomorrow I’ll post brief synopses of each of my stories, kind of like what the blurbs you’d see beneath the story title in the table of contents in an anthology. And once I figure out how to get ’em all copyrighted, maybe I’ll post the coolest of the cool parts on this website.
In alphabetical order, here’s the first eight stories:
"Armistice" – Geoffrey saw fierce action in France in WWI, survived to climb the ladder of post-war intelligence, and guide his nation through the Cold War. But can his conscience find peace with itself for what may have happened down in those trenches so many years ago?
"The Bathysphere" – Henry and his flamboyant mentor, the Professor Archie Dodd, plan the first high-profile descent to the bottom of the sea in a cramped iron sphere. Soon they’re face-to-face with something that severs the thick chain that’s their only lifeline to the surface world and find themselves plummeting to the ocean floor.
"Coins In The Sewer" – Question: Is teen-age Vincent a loser, or is he a serial killer? Both, or neither? And why does he throw his spare change down a sewer drain every night? (Based on an image from a Stephen King short story, "Everything’s Eventual.")
"The Gulley" – June and her cousins loved nothing better than spending the summer days playing in the woods around their Kentucky home. Then one very hot August night they find themselves under assault from mysterious entities emerging from the dark gulley behind their home.
"It’s Gonna Snow" – A group of post-apocalyptic survivors trapped inside a bunker due to the radiation pollution can only raise a spooky voice on the shortwave – and it seems to be approaching …
"K3" – The first multinational expedition to conquer the K3 mountain is an essential public display of global peace and cooperation. But an assassin has been discovered as one of the members of the team, and Moyet has the impossible task to discover his – or her – identity before tragedy occurs. But who exactly is Moyet?
"The Lumps" – Phil is a research biochemist hard at work researching deadly viruses for the government. Then one morning he finds two lumps on his neck, and very quickly doubts his sanity as well as reality as aliens, time travel, and his clone insert themselves into his once-perfect life.
"Mister Kingdom" – Sick and alone in an orphanage, Hannah tries to save her bed-ridden friend from a shadowy figure known only as "Mister Kingdom."
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