Just in time for my birthday! Do you want to help me celebrate? Buy a copy of my new collection of short fiction! Buy it for kindle or in paperback!

It’s the perfect way to help celebrate my birthday because I get a sale and you get a book! It’s a win-win!

And, just to pique your interest: Here is the introduction to the book!

FOREWORD

One of the problems with being a writer is one of the basic problems of being alive and that is the unreliability of memory.

I’ll get to that in a minute.

Rage Machine Books had published my short story collection of dark fantasy stories in a volume called HERALDED BY BLOOD. This was a collection of stories that I had sold to various markets through the years plus one or two that had never been published prior to that collection.

I had always imagined that they would welcome a companion volume for my science fiction stories that had found markets. I reckoned that I had just enough short stories to fill a slim volume.

But then I thought; what about a collection of the stories that hadn’t found a market?

I conceived of an anthology of short stories called Unloved Tales. The reason they were unloved was because, despite being shunted around to several markets and having made their way in front of the eyes of editors who could potentially purchase them, they were passed on in favor of other, and, perhaps, better stories.

I had what I thought was a rather robust table of contents for this collection… sadly. Stories that I thought were all well and fine, indeed, stories that other editors thought were good stories…

…just not good enough.

And I was tired. Tired of sending the stories out to markets, tired of waiting for a reply, tired of wondering how long I should wait for a reply before sending the story out again to another market, and then repeating the process.

So I thought I would gather up all of these stories… all of these good but not quite good enough stories… and give them a home. A final destination, if you will. It was somewhat akin to retirement. Or perhaps the literary equivalent of sending old Boxer out to pasture (or to the glue factory).

I even had cover art for it.

Then one of the stories sold. That had to be removed from the Table of Contents for obvious reasons.

Then, as I was going through the list I realized that I had run up against that most human of problems, one that tends to get exacerbated with the advancement of years… a failing memory.

Two of the stories in my potential table of contents had found markets that I had forgotten about. They had appeared in a magazine many years ago. Paying markets.

Perhaps it wasn’t big pay. It may only have been a nominal stipend. Nevertheless, those stories could not be considered to be unloved.

Well, after that the entire enterprise collapsed like a house of cards.

However, I did still have my potential list of stories for my companion science fiction anthology. Now I had an opportunity to bring that anthology up to snuff in terms of word count. By combining the two I now had almost 70,000 words of fiction that could make up the collection.

So I had my science fiction collection (though some of the stories are not, strictly speaking, science fiction. Some are clearly fantasy and some defy categorization).

That, plus the fact that not all of these stories ever found a market. Some of the tales in this collection were unloved.

But what of it?

Perhaps these stories will find the love that they were denied in the marketplace. Perhaps as part of this collection these tales will find some modicum of affection from you, reader. After all, if you are reading this either on a printed page or an illuminated screen, congratulations! You have found the stories that were previously unloved until you have showed them some regard.

You may not like them. You may say to yourself; “Well, that wasn’t worth the hard earned cash I plunked down to get this volume sent to my device!” Or you may say; “That story was great! What editor in his right mind would have passed that gem up?”

It’s an arbitrary judgment for a story to have to pass through some form of gatekeeper in order to be deemed worthy. I wrote it. I chose it for this collection. It has the same worth now as all of its brothers, sisters or cousins sharing these pages.

The worth of each story is now for you to decide. Read on. Enjoy. If you hate a story, give the next one a try. If you love a story, move on to the next. You might love that even more.

You, after all, dear reader, have the only judgment on these efforts that I care about.

Sound interesting? Then check it out here!