Collecting Stories

What I’ve Been Up To So Far in 2026 (No. 83)

I’ve spent much of the past few weeks immersed in a side project involving two of my short story collections: The Bug Jar and Ocean of Storms. Both books were born under somewhat unusual circumstances, and to be honest, I’ve never been entirely satisfied with their length or their overall production quality.

The Bug Jar and Other Stories originated as a “quick and dirty” response to winning my first Anson award in 2016. I had submitted my short story, “Bandito,” to their annual contest without expecting much to come of it. When I received the call that I’d won, along with an invitation to the awards ceremony, I was told I would have the opportunity to sell my books at the event.

At the time, I had only published two nonfiction business books that were about as interesting as watching paint dry. With only a few weeks to prepare, I scrambled to compile a collection from the dozen or so short stories I had scattered across various notebooks and hard drives. Some, like “Ghost Walk” and “Take Up Serpents,” weren’t even close to being publishable (and still aren’t) and didn’t make the cut. The rest were rounded off and edited within just a day or two. The result was a thin, hastily assembled volume that didn’t precisely capture the vision I had for my fiction.

Similarly, the original version of Ocean of Storms was a limited-edition hardcover containing only the three core stories, published to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing. At just 50 pages, it was even slimmer than The Bug Jar. While a later “expanded” paperback edition added three more stories and brought the page count closer to 70, it still felt thin.

I have long toyed with the idea of merging these two slender volumes into a single, more substantial collection, but I never quite found the momentum until this past month.

While I wanted to preserve the “rough and ready” flavor of the older works, I took the opportunity to finally scrub away the typos and grammatical errors that had slipped through the first time around. More importantly, I’ve made some significant content updates.

When I was originally pressed for time, I truncated the messy final chapter of “Mean Estate,” thereby arguably altering the piece’s theme and impact. In this new volume, I’ve rewritten and restored the original, more definitive, and hopeful ending.

I’ve also moved the three Falling Up the Hill stories into this collection. While including them in my hiking memoir seemed like a good idea at the time, hindsight has shown they were an unconventional fit for a straightforward nonfiction narrative.

To round out the volume, I’ve added five newer stories that have never been formally published, although a couple have previously appeared as “freebies” on my website.

This new, consolidated edition finally feels like the home these stories have been waiting for—a collection with the weight and polish that reflects my journey as a writer since 1995. The resulting volume, titled Collected Stories 1995-2025, will be published by Mountain Island Press on February 3rd.

I’m excited to finally see these stories living together in a format that does them justice. The collection will be available in both paperback and Kindle formats.