Thief in the Night Saturday, Oct 27 2007

I wrote a neat draft of the introduction, with a lot of questions. Then I said to myself, “You’re giving away the ending of the story again. The surprising part is supposed to be after the asterisks. Besides, do not insult the readers’ intelligence. They’ll see what you’ve had in mind. Or they’ll see what they’ll see, and that’s it.” I believe my inner voice was right. So I deleted the draft, and started the intro anew.

This piece was written several years ago, during a somewhat long period of unemployment for me. Suddenly I had too much free time on my hands, and nothing to do. Instead of focusing all my efforts on finding a new job, I took the skeleton of my dream of becoming a professional writer out of the closet, resurrected it, and got down to writing. When I gave this story to a friend of mine to read it, he said it reminded him of Minority Report. To this day, I still can’t find any similarities. Maybe you will.

Enjoy the story.

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The Prophet Saturday, Oct 20 2007

Fortune-tellers, soothsayers, seers, prophets — do we believe in them? Do we dare not to believe in them? Ultimately, there’s a grain of belief in even the most skeptic of us. Black cat, knocking on wood, breaking mirror, etc., etc. — insert your own superstition here. This is not about the answer. This is about the question: What if they’re right?

Enjoy the story.

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Froggy Saturday, Oct 13 2007

Froggy is small, green and loud-mouthed — and he’s not even the main character. I still can’t understand why his name ended up as the title of the story. It was written back in 2003, with two goals in mind. First, I did it for fun, and it did actually turn out as a humor fantasy. The second goal was to have an exercise in writing, and a bit of a show-off, too, because I cooked up a mixture of fairy tales. I’ve read a lot of fairy tales, so let’s see how many of them you will recognize.

Enjoy the story.

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A Welcome & A Warning Saturday, Oct 13 2007

If you’ve been looking for science fiction and fantasy short stories, you’ve maybe come to the right place. For I intend this to not be an ordinary blog, like most of the ones you’re used to. Here, I’ll be posting short stories that I’ve written in different times of the past, under different influences, and in different moods. Why the “maybe” in the sentence? Because I’m nowhere near a professional writer. And yet, I might be the only amateur writer, who’ve won an award, but it was not for science fiction or fantasy–so this is the first part of warning.

You might like what you’ll read. If you do, feel free to leave a comment saying so. If you don’t like my stories, don’t hesitate to say so, either. Just don’t expect me to defend angrily my works. I’m well aware that they’re not the best there is, otherwise they would have been published and I would have become a professional writer long ago. Besides, I like my stories, and I live with the knowledge that there will always be at least one satisfied customer–even if it’s the seller himself. In any case, I’ll be glad to read your comments, and you can be sure that I’ll reply to them when I have the time.

The second part of the warning is that English is not my mother tongue. There will be short stories here, that I’ve written in my own language, which is Bulgarian. If you don’t know it, you won’t be able to read it. I might translate them in English at a later point, but that depends mostly on my free time. It’s much less time consuming just to find the stories, beat the dust out of them a bit, and publish them here. I even found some stories that were actually written on paper, imagine that. I’ll have to type them one day.

A few words about the legal stuff. All the stories on this blog belong to me. You may not publish or copy them elsewhere, without my explicit consent. If you like them so much, drop me a line, and we can think of something. Or even better, write something of your own. Don’t copy–create!

Well, this is it for now. It turned out just a tad longer than I thought, so let’s just consider it my About page, shall we? I’ll soon post the first of my short stories, so stay tuned.

Sincerely yours,

El Volgero

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