Like a lot of writers, my favorite parts of short story collections often aren't the stories at all, but the "story notes" provided by the authors. These can range from short squibs that don't really provide much more information than what's found on the copyright page to lengthy accounts of the events surrounding the writing of the story, its influences and antecedents. The best ones are like little ethnographies with stories as their subjects of study.
A few of my stories are collected in the chapbook Bittersweet Creek, available from Small Beer Press, and a couple of others have been printed or reprinted in various anthologies. But I've never had the opportunity to write up story notes, so I thought I'd take advantage of this journal to indulge in a little hubris. I know, I know, indulging in hubris is something heretofore unknown among writers on the internet. I may do more of these if people like the idea, and won't if they don't. I'll point out where the stories appear online in those cases where they do, and provide downloadable PDFs of those that haven't been electronically reprinted.
First up, Kin to Crows.
This was the first story I sold, and my memory of finding the letter of acceptance in the mailbox is crystal clear almost eight years later. It was in December of 1997, at the rental house on Ewing Avenue with the intertwined red and white dogwoods in the front yard. I had to leave for a company Christmas party just a few minutes after I opened the envelope and saw the contract, and the party turned out to be a "professional" version of one of those How-to-Host-a-Murder games. (The bartender did it.)
Kin to Crows was the first story I sold, but the fourth I'd completed as an adult. I wrote it in 1996, in the fourth week of that year's Clarion West Writers Workshop. Geoff Ryman was the instructor that week, and after he'd read both the story and a couple of issues of the Adair Progress I had lying around, he said "Adair is your secret weapon."
Like a lot of my early stories, it's set in the imaginary Cane County, which is an amalgam of the place I grew up and a romanticized version of the place I grew up, liberally salted with some second-hand Appalachian folkways. I remember spending an afternoon in the map room of the Louisville library working with the quad maps of south-central Kentucky, mentally adding ridge lines and moving lakes so I could nestle Cane County in among the real world Adair, Casey and Taylor Counties.
It's also the, or at least an, "origin story" of a character named Japheth Sapp, who continues to appear in various contradictory forms in my fiction. One of my goals for my novel-in-progress, The Border State, is to exorcise old Japheth.
Kin to Crows first appeared in the June 1998 issue of Realms of Fantasy. The full page, full color illustration was by a David Martin. There seem to be at least three David Martins working in the field of fantasy illustration, but on the evidence of the line work of this piece, I'm pretty sure "mine" is the one who later won a Chesley Award in the gaming-related illustration category. I was very pleased with the layout of the story in the magazine, which featured a ghostly, silhouetted crow behind the text.
They used a photograph of me on the contributors page in which I was wearing round rimmed glasses, a wool fisherman's sweater and a full beard, so I'm not coming to this hubris thing late. The teaser the magazine used for the story, well, it was what it was: "Vengeance is a dish best served cold—much the way carrion birds prefer their meals." I'll leave it to you to determine how applicable that is.
The story garnered an honorable mention in the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, Twelfth Annual Collection, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. It was later reprinted online by Ideomancer when I was their featured author in the summer of 2002, and then in my chapbook (linked above) Bittersweet Creek, in 2003.
The Ideomancer version is still online, so I'll let that page act as the official text, at least so far as this virtual collection is concerned. It's strange, now, to read something I wrote when I was almost a decade younger, but I'm still proud of it—even if it reminds me, in more than one way, of something Terry Bisson said about the dialect in an early draft of another of my stories: "It's thick, but it's accurate."