I have posted two stories under the “Free Stories” link at the top of the page. The first is part of my short story collection, 14 DARK WINDOWS, and is titled “Grandpa”. It’s a short tale (about 700 words) about a boy who is enjoying his time with his grandfather. It is the first story in that collection, and if you download the free sample from Amazon, you also get it in its entirety.
The second story is called “The Book And Candle Pub”. There’s a little bit of backstory about it.
Back in the 90’s, I was part of, and helped to run, an internet forum on Delphi Internet Services called “The Book and Candle Pub”. The Pub was a friendly place where I made several good online buddies. We started life as “The Stephen King Club” on Prodigy but moved to Delphi for some reason that is lost in the recesses of my memory. (Probably had something to do with cost.) We were joined by people from NVN and GEnie, two other online services, and we had a nice little community which was pretty active. My role was “conference coordinator”, and I moderated chat sessions with our author guests. I also would coordinate their forum visits sometimes as well.
Another big part of the Pub was our writing games. We had an ongoing contest called “The Publican Brief” and a lot of the stories in 14 DARK WINDOWS were written for that contest. So was this second story. The challenge was to write a short story describing how we saw our place in physical terms. I always liked mine, since it fit my vision. So here it is, for the first time since it appeared in that forum. I won’t ever publish it elsewhere. I hope someone finds it mildly interesting.
Here’s how to get to the stories.
*****