A Story A Day!

I've been more prolific than usual lately, and new stories have been jumping off the page…three yesterday, and one, so far, today. I have moved away from downtown Tucson and the University of Arizona neighborhood into the far east side, the area where Paul McCartney has a ranch.. I'm looking at the same mountains (the Catalina Range in the north, the Tucson Mountains just west of the city, and the Rincons to the east), that he does at his ranch. 

I wonder if I can convey the feeling of being in the Tucson area in the languid, brilliant summer.  Late every afternoon thunderstorms have been trying to make it through Redington Pass into the valley from the east, and I've had a great view.  Last night there was a green sunset.   I wrote a story about it today — a green sunset when the blue of the horizon is touched by a yellow-orange, sun-struck layer of clouds.   Early this evening, the green sunset was back, with even more striking teal and blue-green atmospherics.  I've been told the clouds are fantastic in Tucson in the summer because It's nature's way of partly making up for the infernally hot temperatures.   Anyway, this is a fine vacation.  This is a fine time to be writing.  I was getting tired of the pace, downtown, and the emergency vehicles and the chance a truck would someday jump the curb and come right through the stucco wall and the cactus right through my 1870's hutch.  What a relief to be outside the major traffic!   In fact, I am being a little lethargic with some of my psychic and astrology clients.  It is taking me 3 days to do a turn-around that used to take me 12 hours.  The rapidity and the excitement has now been imparted into the rapid pace of the new stories that I'm writing!

I know this speedy storytelling can't continue indefinitely.  In the long run my rate of composition will drift back down to a story per week or so,  maybe less than that.  Sometimes months go by, but I don't write stories.  But for now, I'm operating at a high level.  Some of these stories will fit into my  "Brothers Grimm" category,  which is also a book I'm working on.  But others are sci-fi, and still others are stories for teens and children.  Funny, as I'm getting older, it is actually much easier for me to tell a tale than when I was a younger man.  Isn't that the tradition around the world ? That older men are the tellers of tales, and the youngsters are the avid listeners?  Or, they WERE avid listeners in the days before computer games & the like. 

I may have mentioned previously that I've re-discovered about 200 different articles, stories, features, and term papers that I did from the 1960's and '70's.   These are typed and stapled modules of material, all I have to do is retype it onto a database.  This joins 400+– poems of mine that I also found at the same time, dating back to that same era.  I used to be known as a poet — can you believe?  I won the James D. Phelan contest, for example, in 'Patterned Verse'.  Over the next year or so, I hope to include some of my better efforts of both the poetry, the stories, and the non-fiction in my ever-expanding database.  Thank goodness I type so fast!

As for my new stories, If anyone wants to join me on this ongoing ride into Storyland, just send me your e-mail address with a little note about your love of stories, or whatever genres you find the most pleasing, and I will send you a free story. If you like that, you can also get a story per day (or up to two months, or a story per week for a year!  That's my "Short Story Roller-Coaster" referred to on my "Haunted Short Story Attic" page on his same site. That, however, is a paid service. I can send the stories, one at a time, to anyone you'd like me to send 'm too…  Just think about it!  It would be great fun for some, possibly more than they ever wanted, for others!  Hey, they can always cancel, right?  They can always delete upon receipt if the story doesn't seem right for them!  Thank You!    ——Ed