IT WAS OF INTEREST TO ME, CRANE!
Gah. Now I have story interruptus. Thanks a lot.
TOAD WORDS
AND OTHER
STORIES
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, places, large waterfowl, events, or actual historical personages, living, dead, or trapped in a hellish afterlife is purely coincidental.
© 2014 Ursula Vernon
For Ben
Introduction
For a very long time — rather an embarrassingly long time — I did not believe that I could write short stories.
I held this belief despite the fact that I had written several. Those didn’t count. They were some other thing, a story, yes, and one that was not terribly long, but not a short story.
Because I didn’t write short stories.
It was mostly a belief that I was not capable of doing something so disciplined. I wrote long sprawling rambling epics. I could not possibly be brief enough for a short story. Those short … things … had probably started life as haiku and run to five thousand words. That seemed plausible.
(I wrote blog posts, of course, many of which were stories of things that had happened to me, but that was different. My life was never required to have a plot.)
And then one day I sat down and wrote the first half of a story — I believe it was “The Wolf and the Woodsman”— and because it was fundamentally the story of Little Red Riding Hood, I finished it up a few days later and it was done and over and I did not need to follow the heroine until she died or spend a chapter discussing the issues faced by talking wolves in modern-day society.
Some months later, I wrote another one, about Bluebeard’s wife. And another, and another. They were mostly based on fairy tales, which apparently had some power that allowed me to actually stop writing and not continue into hundreds of pages.
But I still did not think that I was writing short stories.
Because I did not write short stories, it did not occur to me that I might try to sell them. There were magazines in the world that bought short stories, but I had long ago filed them under “nothing to do with me.”
I posted them on my blog instead. My faithful readers have endured many indignities in that space, and they claimed to enjoy these, so occasionally I would write more.
(I also occasionally write poems, after first explaining carefully to the audience and myself that I am not a poet and this is not actually a poem and no poetry was harmed in the making of this blog post.) People began asking that I collect these stories into a place where they could get at them more easily, rather than digging through LiveJournal looking for them. Some insisted that they would like to give me money for these things, which struck me as both hilarious and somewhat frightening, because if they gave me money for them, surely they would immediately realize that they had just done something very foolish, because these were not short stories and nobody in their right mind would pay that much money for a really really long haiku.
(Incidentally, this is why I have an agent for my day-job writing.)
And then Sigrid Ellis took over as editor of Apex Magazine, a fine publication of literary fantasy, and sent me an e-mail asking to commission a short story.
I stared at the e-mail for quite some time. No one had ever asked me that before. Why would she think I could write short stories?
She mentioned several of the fairy tale retellings I had done and said she wanted something like that.
I was not entirely sure that I could write such a thing on demand. I had about three months until she needed it, so I naturally sat down and hammered out the entire thing that night, while my husband was getting tattooed.
I then sent it off in an agony of terror because I had just done a thing that I didn’t know how to do, namely write a short story, and of course this nice woman was going to come back and say “You obviously tried really hard but I don’t want to buy this and incidentally please don’t ever contact me again or I’ll go to the police.”
(My sense of proportion gets a little skewed sometimes when I’m afraid of disappointing people.)
That short story—“Jackalope Wives”—does not actually appear in this collection, for which I hope you will forgive me. It does not appear because at the time of this writing, Apex Magazine still has the exclusive rights to it, because Sigrid sent the acceptance back about an hour later. (Thanks, Sigrid!)
And that’s actually good, because I am hoping that it will be the title story in the next anthology I do. There will probably have to be another anthology. I’ve sold two more stories in the interim and apparently writing short stories is now a thing that I do, because I show no signs of stopping.
It is a trifle embarrassing.
Most of the stories in this anthology have appeared on my blog at one time or another, and are collected here. (The blog is in my real name, Ursula Vernon, but the book is written as T. Kingfisher—
