Fiddler Fair (anthology)

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After any number of requests to put all our short stories together in one place, the idea began to take on some merit.

When Larry and I looked into the idea we discovered that we had a lot of other short fiction; about ten years’ worth.

Ten years? Unbelievable as it seemed at the time, I found the very first story I ever had published (I had sold one story before that, but it wasn’t published until the following month). Fantasy Book magazine, September 1985. The story was “Turnabout” which was a Tarma and Kethry story, which is going into another collection. For the record, the first story I ever sold was for Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Free Amazons of Darkover “Friends of Darkover” anthology, which was published in December of that year. The story was “A Different Kind of Courage.”

Some of these stories are a little grey around the edges, but I include them as a kind of object lesson in writing. Some of the things in them I winced at when I read again—I had no idea of how to write a well-viewpointed story, for instance, and someone should have locked my thesaurus away and not given it back to me for a while! And insofar as the march of technology goes—the earliest were written on my very first computer, which had no hard-drive, a whopping four kilobytes—(that’s kilobytes, not megabytes)—of RAM, and had two single sided single density disk drives. I wrote five whole books and many short stories on that machine, which did not have a spell-check function, either. On the other hand, if ewe sea watt effect modern spell-checkers halve on righting, perhaps it that was knot a bad thing. It’s just as well; if it had, it would have taken half a day to spell-check twenty pages.

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