I read the first half of "All Things Must End" at the 2023 StokerCon in Pittsburgh, and once I was done, several members of the audience came up to ask when...
I rarely write short. But when editor Jennifer Brozek put out a call for the anthology 99 Fleeting Fantasies, asking for stories no longer than 1,000...
There are stories which explode out of me as soon as the spark of an idea bursts through my brain, and there are ideas which take decades of simmering...
As the here and now on this planet grew more unpleasant in recent years, I found myself writing more stories of deep space explorations, such as "The Lessons...
I love stories told in the epistolary form, though unlike my 2009 story "The World Breaks," "The Letters They Left Behind" isn't entirely epistolary.
To...
I've never written a stranger story ... nor one which has gestated for a longer period of time ... nor one with a longer title.
My father was the captain...
It's rare I can pinpoint exactly how a story was born, but with "Where You're Supposed to Be," I know the exact inspiration, even though I'm not entirely...
I hadn't had a story published over at Daily Science Fiction since 2011, because their maximum word count dropped, and I don't tend to write short enough...
"The Last Lonely Day in the Orchard of Lost Travelers" was published in issue #19 of Pulphouse, released September 2022.
This story came to be after...
"The Pillow of Disappointment and What Was Found Beneath It" was my third story to be published in June 2022. A fruitful month! It appeared in Pulphouse...
"The Time Traveler’s Assistant Discovers What Could Have Been" was published in Underland Arcana #7, appearing online on the day of the Summer Solstice...
My second publication in DreamForge appeared first online and was later collected in one of the magazine's print editions. Both of these appeared in June...
"Lost Out There in the Stars" was published April 2022 in the third issue of Parsec, the new science fiction magazine from PS Publishing, which had previously...
"And, Behold, It Was Very Good" went live on New Year's Day 2022 in the Winter 2022 issue of Kaleidotrope.
It's one of the few stories for which I can pinpoint...
At exactly 999 words, "Let Me Count the Deaths" is one of the shortest things I've ever written ... but I think it still packs a wallop.
It was published...
"The Body I Used to Be" was published in October 2021 as part of Weirdbook Annual #3: Zombies edited by Douglas Draa.
Yes, it's another zombie story,...
My novella "I Shall But Love Thee Better" was the final story in the anthology Prisms, edited by Darren Speegle and Michael Bailey. It was released March...
"The One What Owns You" appeared in the October 2020 issue of The Dark City. It's a departure for me, a noirish mystery with not a single supernatural...
"A World Without You in It" appeared in the anthology Eighteen: Stories of Mischief & Mayhem, which was published in March of 2020.
It's a love story...
"Answered Prayers" appeared in the fifth issue of DreamForge magazine, published in March of 2020.
I was extremely pleased that when SFRevu took a look...
My short story "Only Bruises Are Permanent" appeared in the anthology Miscreations: Gods, Monstrosities & Other Horrors, published February 2020.
I'm...
My short story "Five Years Later" appeared in the Harlan Ellison tribute anthology The Unquiet Dreamer, edited by Preston Grassman and launched in August...
"The Stranded Time Traveler Embraces the Inevitable" — a story which broke me out of the writing block I found myself in after the 2016 presidential...
This tale, which appeared the anthology Birthing Monsters: Frankenstein’s Cabinet of Curiosities and Cruelties, is something of a hybrid between Stranger...
I no longer remember when I first heard of Ray Bradbury's encounter with the carnival performer Mr. Electrico, who changed the writer's life and was never...
It took me 44 years of trying to make my first sale to Analog. Luckily, it only took me a few more months than that to sell them a second.
"How Val Finally...
"Pity This Busy Monster Not" appeared in Adam's Ladder, an anthology edited by Darren Speegle and Michael Bailey, which was published in September 2017...
“After the Harvest, Before the Fall" appears in the January/February 2017 issue of Analog, a magazine market it took me 44 years to crack.
You can read...
My most recently published short story, the far-future science fiction tale "101 Things to Do Before You’re Downloaded," appears in the anthology You,...
I don't usually cry when reading my stories aloud, but "And the Trees Were Happy," published July 2016 in the anthology Genius Loci, has gotten to me every...
My post-apocalyptic science fiction short story, "The Man Without the Blue Balloon and the Woman Who Had Smiles Only for Him," was published May 2016 in Postscripts...
"That Perilous Stuff," an unsettling story of two siblings and their mother for whom hoarding has gone terribly wrong, appeared April 2016 in Chiral Mad 3.
You...
"Becoming Invisible, Becoming Seen," a dark but (hopefully) uplifting horror story of love and obsession, was published by Dark Discoveries in its March...
“A Most Extraordinary Man” was published by NonStop Press in its June 2014 anthology The Monkey's Other Paw: Revived Classic Stories of Dread and the Dead.
If...
"Things That Never Happened" appeared in November 2013 in Postscripts, the fourth story of mine to be published in that hybrid magazine/anthology.
A...
Hard to believe that my first short story in Space and Time appeared 30 years before this one ... but time flies.
"A Test of Faith for a Couple of True...
I've always had a love/hate relationship with the city of my birth, which is why I was so pleased to be a part of editor Luis Ortiz's anthology project,...
My fantasy story "How Amraphel, the Assistant to Dream, Became a Thief, Lost His Job, and Found His Way" (quite a mouthful, eh?) appeared online at Daily...
You know how What Will Come After was meant to be a collection of my complete zombie stories? Well, it was ... until the day the book was launched at the World...
When Pete Crowther over at PS Publishing agreed to collect my complete zombie stories to date in a single volume, all he asked was that I provide him with...
I knew I wanted to write "Tell Me Like You Done Before," a story that zombifies Of Mice and Men, at least a decade before I wrote the first sentence or figured...
What happens to someone who desperately wants to die once death no longer exists? That's the dilemma faced by this story's protagonist once the dead start...
I can remember exactly where I was when when my subconscious gave me this story.
I was in Manhattan, walking east on 42nd Street toward the United Nations,...
I am "deep, disturbing, and emotionally draining." Well ... not me personally. Rather, it's my novella The Hunger of Empty Vessels, about the tortured...
I wrote "Glitch," a story about robot sex in the future (did I get your attention?) hoping to place it in an anthology with the theme of Artificial Intelligence.
Just...
You can thank Farah Mendlesohn for the creation of this story, though this she didn't know it at the time. Farah had announced her intentions to put together...
When I was asked by the editors of the 2008 World Horror Convention to contribute a story to the con's souvenir program book, I never expected that the piece...
Rather than going on myself about this tale, which was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award, I'll just share what reviewer Val Grimm had to say about it at The Fixx....
When my short story "The Awful Truth About the Circus" was published in the British anthology with the complex title of Zencore!: Scriptus Innominatus,...
I've always found the end of the world appealing. (Well, the idea of the end of the world. I could do without the real thing, which unfortunately seems...
My wife and I went to the Galapagos Islands in September, 2001. We'd made made plans earlier in the year that we were going to fulfill that particular...
Editor Mike Heffernan took the title for his WWII horror anthology A Dark and Deadly Valley (published April 2007) from the statement made by Winston Churchill...
In the far future, four posthumans take a trip back to the place where the human race was born ... and discover that Earth isn't quite what they expected....
This story was published in August 2005, but I had to wait three months to tell anyone of it, because with the annual anthology Nemonymous, editor and publisher...
I have always been fascinated by the skeleton that lies beneath the skin of Story, and in "This Is Where the Title Goes," published in The Journal of Pulse-Pounding...
My Randy Newman-inspired story, "My Life is Good," appeared in Crossroads: Tales of the Southern Literary Fantastic, published August 2004 and edited by F. Brett...
Charles L. Grant has always been a master of atmospheric horror—not the kind that runs at you with a meat ax, but instead the sort that sneaks up on you....
Mike Resnick edited two anthologies on a similar theme in 2003—Women Writing Science Fiction as Men (for which I was obviously not qualified) and Men Writing...
Editor Jim Lowder's third anthology of zombie short stories, The Book of Final Flesh, was released in June 2003, proving that you can'd keep a good man down....
Stories rarely come to me in dreams. Sometimes, while I'm falling asleep, a character or an opening line or a plot nugget might sneak into my mind, and I'll...
Back in the summer of 1988, I published a strange little short story titled "Buffalo" in Ice River magazine, a journal of slipstream fiction published...
Is the science-fiction field incestuous? Yes. Is that a bad thing? I'm not entirely sure. If editors are buying substandard stories from writers merely...
I think that as a child I must have been infected by Theodore Sturgeon, and I've never been the same since. I once read that he considered all of his stories...
Editor Pete Crowther, having allowed me to go to the Moon back in 1999 in his anthology Moon Shots, gave me clearance to orbit the Red Planet in Mars Probes,...
The third act of Thorton Wilder's "Our Town" has always made me cry. I guess I should have realized that meant it was only a matter of time before I'd create...
As an editor, I know how annoying it can be when writers don't stick to the guidelines. So I can imagine what went through editor Mike Ashley's mind when...
These Words Are Haunted reprinted ten of my favorite previously published horror short stories in one hardcover volume, but also included three never-before-seen...
It's rare for a story to spring full-blown into my mind. Usually, I just get a brief glimpse of a character or situation and have to construct the story...
When Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg, and Marty Greenberg decided to put together Horrors! 365 Scary Stories, a horror anthology containing a short...
I normally don't recommend that writers self-publish, as the results are very rarely taken seriously, but this is one case in which it worked out. Back...
There are times when it seems that in search of creating a moving story, I not only ignore the marketplace, I often write against it.
"Getting a Grip...
Sometimes, the smallest sins receive the harshest penalties. That's what was so pleasing about Stanley Elkin's novel The Living End, in which a good man who loves...
Even though I lived through the upheavals of Vietnam and Watergate, the era of 20th Century American history that has always fascinated me the most came...
Looking back on it now, this story was perhaps a bit too influenced by the opening chapter of Italo Calvino's wonderful If On a Winter's Night a Traveler,...
Published by Stefan Dziemianowicz's Necronomicon Press in 1992, Suicide Art is a 36-page chapbook containing two of my short stories. Both were previously...
We've all heard the standard rules of writing—always start with a sympathetic character, always show and never tell, don't shift points of view in short...
It is said that time heals all wounds, but I don't think it does, not really. What time seems to do instead, for me at least, is erase the emotional memories...
My original title for this story set in a research facility during a future in which all of the animals in the world are dying was "Everyone Suspected...
Driving home from the cemetery where he had just buried his wife of six years, Anton Jervik, still dressed in black, stopped at Harriman's Hardware. From...
When we go to buy a house, the bank runs a credit report to decide whether we're worthy of our loan. And if there are errors, it's up to us to correct...
"And don't try to follow me or I'll kill this book!"
So began my story in the 1989 issue of Beyond. "Stealing Alice" takes place during a future in which...
This was one of two stories I've written that begin "Once upon a time." (I promise never to do it again.) It tells the tale of the private life of appliances...
Don't confuse my short story, "Buffalo," published in Ice River in the Summer of 1989, with John Kessel's much better 1991 short story, also titled "Buffalo,"...
Two young brothers visit Coney Island, seemingly for a day of fun. But as time passes, a secret is hinted at, and then revealed—the apparent younger...
Looking back, this short story, published in a 1988 issue of the horror magazine Eldritch Tales, seemed a holdover of the many comic-book stories I was writing...
When a man in a concentration camp is granted three wishes, he uses them in a most unexpected way ...
This may be the only title I've ever come up with...
A loser has an unhealthy relationship with mice in this story published in the 12th issue of Eldritch Tales back in 1986. The story wasn't that bad, but the title...
With "Namestealer's Journey," which was published in the Spring/Summer 1985 issue of Potboiler, I came up with a fantasy conceit which I now realize was so unwieldly...
What can someone do who longs to learn the taste of human flesh, but is too nice a person to turn cannibal? That's the question I answered in "The Last...
Every writer has to write a deal-with-the-Devil story sometime, just to get it out of his or her system. I think that it's one of the stepping stones across...
I learned two valuable lessons during my marketing of this story about a department-store detective and the strange discovery he makes.
Lesson Number...
I had an odd approach to writing back in the early '80s. (Some would say that I still have an odd approach to writing, but we'll talk about that some other...
While I'm unwilling to guarantee it, I'd certainly be willing to at the very least give great odds that this was the only story ever published in the more...
Pulpsmith was a very eclectic magazine. It billed itself as publishing fiction and non-fiction that was at "the interface between popular and experimental...
People are always writing stories about unicorns and virgins. I thought it would be interesting to invert that relationship.
So in this story, the two characters...
"The Test" was the second story written while at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop to see print. No other stories produced at that workshop...
I wrote too many stories with punning titles in the '80s. It's a disease from which I think I've since recovered. (At least I hope I have. You be the judge.)
But...
"I just cut down the tree my parents planted the day that I was born." That's how my story in the Fall 1981 issue of Night Voyages began.
It's an end-of-the-world...
My first published short story was the rewrite of one I wrote while at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop during the summer of 1979. My instructors...
