Yesterday — the last day of July — I spontaneously decided to submit a story to the Whortleberry Press Halloween anthology. I hadn’t planned to submit anything, even though Whortleberry has published three other stories of mine in previous books (Strange Halloween, for example), but because the end of July was the deadline, I found myself thinking, What can I send? I settled on a quirky, short — barely a thousand words — story entitled “Grandma on Her Rocking Chair” that revolves around unseen dead relatives going up and down the staircase at Grandmother’s house. Resetting the time to October 31 was all that was needed to make this into a Halloween story. In truth, all those dead relatives actually made more sense in the context of All-Hallows. Then I sent the story off for consideration. A mere three hours later — fastest time ever — I received back a message from the editor, saying they liked it and wanted to buy it for the anthology. So another short story sale, this one unplanned and triggered by a sudden urge to meet a Halloween deadline in July.
