INTRODUCTION
Patrick Swenson
I KNOW JAMES VAN PELT A LITTLE. OKAY, MAYBE A LOT. I knew him early on from the short stories he’d sent to me for the magazine I edited, Talebones. I received a story from him called “Miss Hathaway’s Spider.” I don’t remember if it was the first story he sent me, but it might have been. He’d submitted it to a ton of markets and couldn’t sell it, but he believed in the story. It just goes to show you that sometimes you need to put the right story in front of the right editor at the right time. Jim is a teacher. Whaddya know? So am I! I instantly understood what he was doing in the story, including its clever structure around Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain. I bought it for the Spring 1998 issue. Nine more Van Pelt stories followed, on up until 2008, a year before the magazine closed.
In 2001, I knew him well enough to know I wanted a short story collection from him. Strangers and Beggars came out the next year and was an ALA Best Book. My good luck is that James Van Pelt keeps coming back to Fairwood Press. Also, he is a prolific short story writer, with over 150 published stories to date. Including this new book, I’ve now done five collections with him. I also published two of his novels. His first, Summer of the Apocalypse, is my bestselling title to date. It still sells well, over ten years later.
In 2007, I started a writers retreat called The Rainforest Writers Village, which I host at Lake Quinault, WA, every February and March. (There are three different sessions over three weeks.) Jim has been to one of the sessions every year except the first one. While the primary activity at the retreat is writing, I schedule a few one-hour talks by professional writers on topics that might be of interest to the attendees. Jim has taught a lot of them over the years, and they’re always well attended. (Remember I said he was a teacher?)
A couple years ago he said he was planning to write a story a week for a year: a challenge that Ray Bradbury had once suggested writers do if they wanted to improve their writing skills. (You’ll read more about this in Jim’s afterword.) He asked if he could do a talk about the entire process and the results, knowing that when the 2016 retreat started, he would have just finished his year of writing. Naturally, I said of course.
He sold a lot of those stories he wrote during that year. Thirty-five of them. That means he sold 67% of the 52 stories he wrote in one year. It’s an impressive feat, to say the least. This collection includes twenty-four of those published stories. That’s close to half of the stories he wrote in a year.
My point is: James Van Pelt can write a short story. He’ll confess he learned quite a bit during that year, but he’s one of our best speculative storytellers. Certainly, a writer can learn to do better. (We can all learn to do better at anything, if we practice a lot.) He presented the talk a second time this past February, but to a different session and to a different set of writers. He talked about the process and what he learned. During this long trek, he traveled into weird country, saw peculiar dead ends, discovered hidden cities, and blazed new trails (for him). So it seemed natural that he should share what he learned during his travels into the writing process and persistent invention.
Jim and I would have done another collection, regardless of his story-a-week challenge, but now we had something unique: here was a chance to publish a collection that contained only the published stories from this year-long journey into the writing wilderness. Jim also had the idea that he should make this collection of interest to readers and writers alike. He decided to write a story note before the story that would be of interest to readers (which is pretty much all of us, isn’t it?), and to write a story note at the end of the story that would be of interest to writers. (I’m also one of those, so bonus!)
Many years ago, Jim and I talked about putting together a writing book about plot. We would get permission to reprint some classic SF stories, and then Jim would deconstruct them and explain why they succeeded on the plot level. Stories included Robert Silverberg’s “Caught in the Organ Draft,” Bob Shaw’s “The Light of Other Days,” and many others. He would talk about plot being a metaphor. (We thought Plot is a Metaphor might be a great title for it. Jim mentions this idea in a story note for writers after his story “No One is So Fierce.”) While this project never quite coalesced, I hope to some day talk him into bringing it to fruition. In the meantime, we have something even better: James Van Pelt’s newest short stories and his fascinating insights about them.
I chose not to single out stories in this introduction. Seriously, if you’ve bought this book, you’ll read them (in whatever order and in whatever manner you like) without me having to convince you that they’re fabulous. I’ve read them and loved them, as I have read and loved most of his stories. I’ve read and published, in five collections, 98 of his 152 published stories. (If you go to his website, you’ll see all of them listed there in his bibliography.) This pretty much makes me an expert on his short stories.
I know him well, so take my word for it and read a Van Pelt story—or twenty-four. Experience The Experience Arcade. Immerse yourself into the fireworks show, the fantastic carnival, and try your luck. But keep your pocket change handy. You’ll be back for more.