The Story behind the Stories

I was delighted to finally get a small group of short stories in shape and formatted for Kindle this past week.  Click  here  if you're interested in reading the first few pages of the book. Three of the stories had been sitting in my files for more years than I want to admit and had never been honed finely enough to ever find a publisher. Now with the ease of Kindle and its kindred electronic readers, a writer doesn’t need to go through a magazine editor (sometimes to the readers’ detriment). 

Be that as it may, I thought I’d share the background to the stories in TWO SIDES OF A DIFFERENT COIN without giving away the plots.  

The story about the 13^th anniversary is grounded in fact only in that the story germinated in my mind as I modeled my wedding gown at a Christian Women’s Club luncheon Wedding Dress Revue—on my 13^th wedding anniversary. So now you can see how these stories get started.J      

Eureka! had its birth in a short story writing class I took one winter in Laramie.  Since I’ve never been mechanically apt, that story seemed like a natural, but I received a lot of helpful ideas from writer friends on this end of the story. I also pestered Dean almost to distraction one afternoon when the Internet sources had baffled me on one point regarding steering column locking devices.

The idea for The Challenger was birthed the first time I saw my dad play pool in our basement in Rawlins, Wyoming. Dean had seen an ad for the pool table and thought we’d all enjoy playing (of course he’d already learned the game during his degenerate teen-age years). My folks came to visit that summer and Dad wowed the family with his expertise. Turns out the ol’ farm boy had learned to play while he was in the Army during WWII.

The story about the cattle herd and the angel is my dad’s story—a true story, by the way. I first wrote up the account  after he told us the story and I sent it to Guideposts. They called me asking for Dad's contact information since I submitted it as an As Told To story. I gave them the info, but the Guideposts caller never followed through.

After Dad died, my brother wrote up a version of the story and I submitted it to Guideposts again –this was six years later than the first submission. They again contacted me but wanted to talk to my brother since I listed him as the person who told me the story. He informed them that the story was actually our father’s story—and since he was now dead, it would be impossible to verify the story with him. So it didn't get published.

I'm happy to say that now, 25-30 years after Daddy first told us his story, it’s in a format that can be read by anyone interested. I set the story in a completely different family but the story is his, and it’s truth, not fiction. And totally unexplainable unless you credit it to God’s mighty hand. Just thinking about it still gives me chill bumps!