Excerpt

EXCERPT FROM WORLDS OF WONDER
COPYRIGHT © TRACY COOPER-POSEY 2020
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Worlds of Wonder

Although I’ve never actually surveyed all the authors I know, I suspect that if I were to ask, I would find that like me, most of them have a great many short stories they’ve written over the years piled up on their hard drives like snow against a fenceline.

Short stories were once difficult to sell, harder to market and the realm of literary magazines and poor selling anthologies—except for the science fiction genre, which enjoys a rich and prolific short story industry.

Yet short stories are palate cleansers for authors. They’re scratch pads and art notebooks – opportunities to experiment, write in different genres, try out ideas. It’s difficult to avoid adding a short story or two to the archives each year.

There are also authors who write nothing but short stories, and carve out a living from the genre, although they are an endangered species these days.

I also know a number of authors who write short stories to explore and develop characters and situations they will use for a novel they’re working their way up to.

Ann McCaffrey is a good example of this. Her fabulous Pern series, which begins with Dragonriders of Pern, began as a short story about an overlooked drudge being chosen to ride dragons. You can find the short story inside the first book: Indeed, it opens the book.

McCaffrey was fortunate to be writing in the SF field and went on to publish the short story in one of the many SF and fantasy magazines of the day. The response encouraged her to write the book.

I, on the other hand, have a dozen short stories that have been kicking around for years because they are not strictly romance (except one) and not novel length (which my readers prefer). Nor do they belong to any of my established romance or SF series.

Now I offer them to you for you to explore the far corners of my writer’s imagination.

Enjoy.