All my life, I've loved short stories. When I started reading, I devoured the experts - Saki, O' Henry, Guy de Maupassent, Katherine Mansfield, Conan Doyle, even Jeffery Archer. Even now, I prefer the short stories of Sherlock Holmes to the longer ones.
It was but natural that when I started writing, I wrote only short stories. As a writer, short stories brought out the best in me- no long descriptive passages, no detailed character descriptions, no long passages of high quality prose. Over a two year period, I must have written a short story a week- many of which did not deserve the space they occupied on my hard disk, some of which catch me by surprise when I re-read them.
It was three of those old short stories that I submitted to the Genre Wars Short Story Contest run by the Literary Lab. Sent them, and forgot all about them. My stories were decent, but I did not think enough of myself either as a writer or as a story teller to expect much from the Contest.
When I got two mails from the Literary Lab telling me that two of the stories were not considered for publication, I only briefly wondered about the third. Imagine my surprise when I got back to my desk after a meeting and found a third mail from them telling me that the third story was going to be included in their anthology.
This is the greatest high I have ever had as a writer. Anthologies were always the books I sought out in libraries and second hand book stores. Never really believed I would ever feature in one myself!
