Tag Archives: short-stories

Two years since my first story published in an anthology, MOTEL

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It’s been two years since the first time one of my short stories was published in an anthology. The Cowboy Jamboree Press MOTEL anthology, edited by Barbara Byar, came out in March 2024. I’d had short stories published before, starting in 2023, and of course my non-fiction had been published since 1977 and in true crime books since 2016. But having a short story in an anthology was a very cool development.

I still really like the story, “Independence,” about an unnamed cowboy passing through a small Tennessee town who gets caught up in a conflict between some small business owners and the corrupt sheriff. If you read my upcoming second novel, SEVEN ANGELS, you might realize that town is Seven Angels. I never cite the town by name in “Independence” but the sheriff in the short story is named and he’s the same corrupt sheriff as in SEVEN ANGELS.

It was a kick to have the story published in an anthology and a few followed. It’s always a kick, although I suspect the anthologies you have to purchase have smaller readership than the stories published online. Still a kick, though.

This year, in 2026, I’ll have short stories in three anthologies I know of, including my story “A Fighting Life,” about foul-mouthed kids in 1948 who figure out they can make money by scrapping with neighborhood kids, which is in the just-published-in-paperback FIGHTING WORDS. My story “This Just Doesn’t Seem To Be My Day,” about a kid spending the day with his older brothers in 1970, will appear this fall in DAYDREAM BELIEVER, an anthology of crime stories based on Monkees songs.

And a while back, I had a crime story accepted for an anthology that hasn’t been announced yet.

For me, three stories in anthologies in one year is a lot, so I doubt there will be others. But I’ll submit some stories and we’ll see.

Here’s a link to the paperback of FIGHTING WORDS is you want to read my short story and the work of some really amazing authors:

2025 so far, so good … ?

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Don’t be fooled by that headline. 2025 is very much a shit show. I’m talking my writing year so far and that ONLY.

I published my 1984-set high school crime novel THAT OCTOBER in June and the reception so far has been pretty good. I have no complaints about how kind and generous people have been. If you’ve read it, please leave a review on Amazon. But buy it from one of the dozens of sites that sell it, especially bookshop dot org or Ink Drinkers Anonymous, the woman-owned, Black-owned bookstore in my hometown of Muncie, Indiana.

Other than THAT OCTOBER, I’ve been pleased to see a number of short stories published or purchased for upcoming publication, including in a future anthology that I can’t wait to tell you about.

In September, I go to my second Bouchercon, the world convention of mystery and crime writers and readers, and I’ll be on my second Bouchercon panel, with a hugely talented group of authors. This one is at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 3, the first day of Bouchercon. This Bcon is in New Orleans, which I’m pretty sure should be mild and breezy by September, right? Right?

But very nearly overshadowing all this is that I submitted, earlier today, a short story to the crime fiction genre’s preeminent market. Now I don’t have any great hope that the story will be published. There are a hell of a lot of great writers out there submitting stories.

But the submission was a goal of mine for 2025. Not to get a story published in that magazine, I will note. Nope. Just to submit a story to them again.

I subbed once before, a few years ago, and their rejection was so perfectly justified but so devastating that I didn’t submit to them again for several years. Hell, I didn’t submit anywhere for a year.

So aside from publishing THAT OCTOBER, and attending and speaking at another Bcon and winning a place in this cool anthology that’s coming up in just a few weeks, getting up the nerve to submit to the Big Show again was a 2025 goal realized.

It’s all gravy from here,

As Homer Simpson would say, “Mmmm … gravy.”

The moral of the story is …

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Here’s a mystery for the ages, and one that I’m not going to solve here.

How much is too much for a writer to care about their work? How much is just enough? How much is not enough?

2024 was a good year for my writing in a lot of ways. Several short stories published. The stories were published with some effort on my part but much more luck. Much more.

So toward the end of 2024, as I began to focus on self-publishing my book THAT OCTOBER, my short story production dropped off dramatically. I didn’t chase every call for submissions like I had been for much of 2024. (This followed a LOT of story rejections, by the way.)

Since I hopped off the short-story-submission merry-go-round, I’ve had, unexpectedly, some luck with short stories. A few months into 2025, Shotgun Honey accepted my short story “Trouble, Start to Finish,” submitted in 2024, and it was published in May. (Link below.) Another story that had been held for months is slotted (for now) for publication, this year I think. Another story that had previously been accepted is still set to publish on December 21, 2025, as far as I know.

Then an author I know contacted me and asked if I had a story in a very particular genre that I might be able to contribute to an anthology he was editing. I had had one in mind and pitched it, he said yes, I wrote it in a couple of weeks and it’s going into an upcoming anthology. I’ll be promoting it when I know some details.

So with THAT OCTOBER out and available everywhere, I’m tentatively looking at short-story writing again. A friend sent me a link to a call for subs and I’m sending the super-short story out this afternoon. No idea if it’ll be accepted.

So is the moral of the story that it’s good to take a breather once in a while? That you should focus more narrowly?

Or is the moral of the story that the less you care about something, the more likely you are to achieve it?

That’d be pretty damn twisted, huh?

Trouble, Start to Finish by Keith Roysdon

Some honesty for you: Self-publishing my novel THAT OCTOBER and rethinking short story writing

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A quick update to start things off: My editor and I pulled the trigger on THAT OCTOBER the other day, uploading the book for self-publishing. What’s next? An electronic proof, then a print proof, then ARCs, then the electronic edition and getting the book in front of as many people as possible.

Writing the book felt easier and more straightforward than self-publishing, it seems. But we’re pushing forward with the book after some technical red flags about the cover. We think it’ll be okay.

Uploading the book came within the same 24-hour period of getting my latest short story rejection. I don’t think I’ve placed more than a short story or two so far in 2025, after a good year in 2024 with about a dozen short stories sold or accepted. One of those has a very long lead time and will be published on December 21, 2025. In the meantime, I’ve got several stories out on submission that I haven’t heard back on.

So it felt like a good time, frankly, to reassess what I’m doing with my writing.

I’ll continue to write pop culture pieces for CrimeReads – my latest, about men’s adventure magazines of the 1950s-1970s, was published today. I’ll have other non-fiction pieces out there too.

But as much as I loved writing short stories – and there’s no doubt it’s a thrill to see them accepted and published – I’m not going to chase every call for submission I see anymore. I’m going to write short fiction more strategically, and I hope to make good on my one 2025 writing goal, besides getting THAT OCTOBER out in the world: targeting the biggest – and most competitive – markets with my short fiction.

This will let me focus my remaining brain cells on the most important tasks I can take on.

And it’ll free up some time to work on my next crime novel.

I haven’t written a novel since I finished THAT OCTOBER in 2023. I’ve got two previous novels that I might revisit, but I want the thrill and enjoyment of writing something new – which will have the added benefit of letting me throw some characters I created for unpublished novels as far back as the early 2000s into the mix.

So I’ll update y’all here, of course, as well as socials like my BlueSky account and my author page on the accursed Facebook.

It’s a good time, with everything in chaos, to exercise a little control over what I’m doing.

I think we can all agree that exercising some control over what we can control these days is a good thing.