An Available Short Story

"The Memory of Pie":

     Is the name of the story in question. I wrote it several years ago now, but no one seemed interested in it.

     OK, that's not entirely true. Neal Shusterman in my writing group quite enjoyed it, and a year or so after I'd presented it to the group for comments, he asked if I'd be willing to co-write a story set in his Arc of the Sythe universe. He said he wanted the main character of the story to be someone like the villain in "The Memory of Pie," and since his idea for the story centered around a dog who'd been genetically altered to have human-level intelligence, he figured it'd be right up my street.

     So I wrote a first draft, he wrote the second, I wrote a third, and after his final pass, our collaboration "Never Work With Animals" was published in 2023 as part of the collection Gleanings: Stories from the Arc of the Scythe.

     Three years later, then, the story that led to that story is finally making an appearance. I'd been sending "The Memory of Pie" around to various markets without success for five or six years when I saw that the folks at Third Flatiron were putting together an anthology of SF and fantasy stories about food. A large part of the story's action involves an attempt to make a peach pie, so I sent the story in, and they liked it enough to buy it. This link will take an interested party to the page on Amazon where the paperback version of the anthology's available, and there's a link on that page to the Kindle version.

                                                                                                         Mike