Dredging Up the Past

Over the past thirty-plus years, I’ve had well over a hundred short stories published in a wide variety of venues. Some, like “Why I Left Harry’s All-Night Hamburgers,” which won a couple of awards, are well-known and pretty easy to find; others, like “Corners in Time,” are utterly obscure.

I’ve decided that the new ease of publishing backlist can be put to use digging out all my old stories and making them available to new readers — for a reasonable price, of course.

I’m planning to try various approaches to see which works best, and one of my first experiments (by way of FoxAcre Press) is now available for the Kindle: The Final Folly of Captain Dancy and Other Pseudo-Historical Fantasies. A paper edition is in the works.

This mini-collection contains four stories. The title piece, my only novella to date, is a seafaring fantasy adventure set in a version of the eighteenth or the nineteenth century that isn’t quite the one our ancestors lived through. Also included: “My Mother and I Go Shopping,” previously published in Adventures in the Twilight Zone; “One Million Lightbulbs,” from Coney Island Wonder Stories; and “Windwagon Smith and the Martians,” first published in Asimov’s and reprinted a few places since.

“My Mother and I Go Shopping” wanders back and forth through time, space, and Faerie. “One Million Lightbulbs” is set in Coney Island’s glory days circa 1905. “Windwagon Smith and the Martians” combines 1854 Missouri with Ray Bradbury’s Mars (used with Mr. Bradbury’s kind permission).

That’s all the pseudo-historical fantasies I could remember writing.

Other small collections I have planned: In the Blood, collecting all my vampire stories; Herding Cats, with all my cat stories; Unicornucopia & Other Stories of Hooves and Horns, which will contain all my unicorn stories and may also get a centaur or two; and Tales of Ethshar, which will collect all the short Ethshar stuff, including the Christmas story and the April Fool’s gag. I expect Tales of Ethshar to be a Wildside Press book.

Beyond those, I don’t know yet. Any suggestions?

I’m also considering publishing individual short stories as e-books — thought I’d start with “Heart of Stone” (previously published in Graven Images). Anything anyone especially wants to see? Any other suggestions?

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