Anyway, I was not going to do another collection of short stories, but someone approached me from the Beverly Hills Public Library. She wanted to present my short fiction in a special evening using actors, but the stories couldn’t be from an older book but from a new one. If I said yes, she couldn’t fit me in for three years, so I went ahead and wrote a batch of new stories at that time, which became Months and Seasons. It’s crazy to do a book just for one night of glory, but I only needed an excuse to write another collection.
The title story, “Months and Seasons,” is about a guy who will only date women whose first name is a month or season, such as April or Summer. It’s his weird notion of finding true love. I used the title of the story for the collection, though, because I realized the ages of the major characters ranged from seven to seventy-eight. The stories cover different seasons of people’s lives.
As readers will find out, the stories often have humor in them, but they are, at heart, stories of real crises in people’s lives.
Sam Sattler, one of the early reviewers of the book at his website Book Chase, compared the stories to tracks on a CD—each track solid. No filler. He and others have found the stories compelling.
Who is your target audience?
Not everyone reads short story collections. In fact, only a small percent of fiction readers do. Then again, when people receive such books as gifts, they find the short story form perfect for their busy lives. You can read a story in a short time and have a full experience. While my stories are layered so that the close reader can find much in them, the average reader, too, will find the stories involving, even fun, and relate to them. These are stories of ordinary people having the kinds of deep problems we’re all faced with.
Good stories help us reflect about our own lives, make us see things we might not normally consider. Philosopher Martin Heidegger basically said most people live life on autopilot, and it’s only when we’re “thrown” are we forced to think. I write stories about people who are thrown, letting the absurdities of our world filter in.
What type of writer are you — the one who experiences before writing, like Hemingway, or the one who mostly daydreams and fantasizes?
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