revised 2 March 2017
Many of these files are plain text. Your browser will probably display them in a font appropriate for short pieces of plain text on an HTML page, but hard to read in quantity. If a file interests you, download it and read it with a word processor or text editor.
To make my plain-text files possible to read with a browser,
I added extra line feeds to cut them into short lines.
Word for Windows does not deal gracefully with extra line feeds.
If you have trouble with a plain-text file,
ask me to e-mail you a copy in which each paragraph is on a single line.
(I prefixed a definition of "endless September" to the file.)
!!NEW!! with added essay on "How to Advertise on Mailing Lists and Usenet"
Shock Amnesia (plain text)
Light Armory (plain text)
Prose (plain text)
I'm most definitely not a fiction writer, but this story made me angry,
and I always write better when I'm angry.
Sometimes I regret that very much,
but this time the result was
Manstealers (html).
And then one day I was poking through my files and said, hey
The Dying Demon (html).
isn't all that bad. This, too, was written in response to
an incredibly-lame published story, but in a fanzine, a publication
that admits that it's the work of amateurs.
(Am I detecting a trend here? Perhaps I should post "Angelan Spring",
which is not a response to anything, and let you say whether it's worse.)
The fanzine, alas, died long before I finished the story I was writing for it.
Anjelan Spring
(html).
No sooner said than done. Well, it took
a couple of months to get around to it, but only an
hour or two to convert it to HTML. HTML is really
easy, once I figure out what I'm doing, and once one
has realized that one formats to a wide left margin
first, and puts paragraph marks in said margins later.
There are two prequels to this story -- I take a long time to warm up, but this is the record, I think, for amount of stuff that had to be snipped off the beginning of a story. Given the teensiest bit of encouragement, I'll HTML those too.
If you squint a bit, "Anjelan Spring" is in the same universe as "Manstealers", but in a different part of the galaxy, and most likely a good bit earlier.
Widow Lady I don't
recall when I wrote this story or where it came
from.
<Olive Oyl>
It's short, and it's
. . . short, and . . . it's short.
</Olive Oyl>
The First Arrangement Plain-text file.
Inspired by Doc Savage even though I've still never seen a Doc Savage story. But I gather from secondary sources that I didn't get quite everything wrong.
This was written before I got my first computer, possibly in the late sixties. I finally got around to punching it in, but haven't shown it to a beta reader yet. Care to comment? My e-dress is my name at comcast dot net.
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