When I decided to turn my short story ‘The Rise and Demise of Fat Kenny’ into a novel, the biggest consideration, literally, was how to turn fifteen hundred words into sixty thousand. I knew there was a novel in there somewhere. I just had to find the key, the way in. I read and I re-read. And the same paragraph kept jumping out. It wasn’t about Ronnie Swordfish and the blood-doping scam, or how Fat Kenny had made it into the big time overnight. It wasn’t even about how he walked into the river at the end and never came out. It was this:
‘Kenny was the lad we never picked for football, but who stayed to watch anyway. Who’d turn up on me doorstep, out the blue, askin me mum if I could come out and play. I’d tell Mum to tell him I was doin me homework, or something. It weren’t just me. I’d see him knock up and down the whole street. One door after another shuttin in his face. In the end, no-one bothered to even open the door to him. Poor bastard. His old man used to beat the shit out of him for bein fat. So did we.’
That was the heart-breaker. That was the key. The childhood.
Ed Kurtz is a busy man. He recently started the publishing imprint 
Though Joe McKinney has made quite a name for himself as a novelist, he was a 2009 Bram Stoker Award nominee, his collection The Red Empire and Other Stories was my first experience with his writing.
They all had degrees, and degrees were supposed to pave the way to careers. They hadn’t, and it was time for another solution. – Arthur Pender
As the title suggests, the stories in Jay Ridler’s short story collection Knockouts: Ten Tales of Fantasy and Noir are thematically linked around fighting. In many of them the fighting is literal – mixed marital arts, bare-knuckle brawling, wrestling – but in others the fighting occurs on a more symbolic level, be it fighting to break free from memories and boundaries, or from the circumstances of life that are trying to drag you down.
I’ve never been much for outlining. Respect to those who can do it, but writing from a treatment has always seemed a little too much like work to me. Anyway, I like being surprised. Usually it’s my characters doing the surprising. Sometimes, though, writing off-the-cuff can lead to some spectacularly unintended consequences for me, the writer, as well. 
Five Shots of the Good Stuff: Why You Should Love Short Story Collections (Including Mine!)
The 2011 Independent Literary Awards Winners have been announced, and I am honored to have served as a voting member of the “Mystery” panel, a category which was included this year for the first time.
“However much you want want to forgive and forget, sometimes you just can’t.” – Steve Priestly
