J.T. McDaniel Official Website

Short Stories and Articles

Writers write. It's a compulsion, I suppose. A lifetime of experience and study comes out through the fingers in the form of words on a typed page or, these days, a computer's video display terminal. Some of these words relate actual events, while others are made up, speaking of events that never really happened.

The short story is a much-neglected form today. We now live in a world where the market for short fiction has shrunk dramatically from what it was when I was growing up. Back then you had a plethora of weekly magazines, all of them with a voracious appetite for short fiction. In my own childhood home we subscribed to The Saturday Evening Post, with its Norman Rockwell covers and Life. Collier's was still around, too. Others got The New Yorker, one of the few survivors, with a well-earned reputation for excellence in fiction and those Charles Addams cartoons.

Today, the main markets for short fiction are more limited. The weeklies are gone, and most of the monthlies buy no more than a single short story per issue. Only in the arena of science fiction and mysteries do we still find the monthly anthologies, several of them still carrying the names of their "founder" on the cover. Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock, all three—Ellery Queen was actually two people, writing as a team—still have their mystery magazines. You don't get rich writing for this sort of modern pulp magazine, but it provides good training.

The stories on this website have never been published elsewhere. Some of them will ultimately be included in Eighteen Hours, the short story collection I've been working on for some time. I'm not going to give a projected release date on that book, though, as I haven't really decided how many stories are "enough."

THE STORIES:

Skagerrak A Hans Kruger story.
Blackout An old-fashioned murder mystery.
Men's Rules for Relationships Not really a story—just some unfortunate truths.
How to Start Your Own Religion A bit of irreverent satire.

The 308th Collection: Some (mostly true) stories from my time with the 308th Combat Aviation Battalion and 101st Airborne Division (Airmobile) in Viet Nam.

Getting There
Wondering
Movie Nights
Sometimes You Leave Them Alone
The Day the Barber Shop Closed