A COLLECTION OF SHORT CONTEMPORARY STORIES
Featuring the Novella: INTO TILOVIA
By James W. Nelson
Dedicated to all my best friends; you know who you are.
INTRODUCTION These are stories taken from not only imagination but personal experience with a whole lot of imagination added. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of occurrences happen every day, every minute, and there is a short story hidden in each one. I am one of the lucky ones who can see that hidden short story, imagine how it could happen differently, take a note or two (I almost always have a tiny notebook and pen on me, and if I don’t I’ll take a napkin, a piece of newspaper, even my hand to write on, and I’ll attempt to borrow a pen from anyone who’s near me from an elegant-looking lady to the scariestlooking guy you can imagine!—I’ve even been known to buy a pen; I must write down that note or two!) and then, on the way home, I’ll scribble more on whatever is handy, and when I get home, I’ll drop every other household chore—including eating—until I’ve gotten those first thoughts safely stored on my hard drive. It used to be harder: I’d have to write everything down by hand and then get to the manual typewriter (In those days I could write by hand faster than I could type.) But once those basic notes were down I could take it from there. A novel develops a little differently, a lot more slowly, but that’s a whole other story.
BIOGRAPHY
James W. Nelson was born in a little farmhouse on the prairie in 1944 (many doctors made house calls in those days) and has been telling stories most of his life. Some of his first memories happened during recess in a one-room country schoolhouse near Walcott, North Dakota. His little friends, eyes wide, would gather round and listen to every hastily-imagined word. It was a beginning. Fascinated by the world beginning to open, he remembers listening to the teacher read to all twelve kids in the eight grades. The first two books he read...