Don't Think Twice

Original Post: 27 March 2014
Posted Here: 29 November 2017

Good news! My short story, "Don't Think Twice," has been accepted by the online SF magazine, "Perihelion," for their 12 April 2014 issue. Please check out their site and read their other stories, too.

As a writer, I like to play with words, and spoonerisms are something that I find interesting. My story about the Adondi girl, Tahiti, "The Winds of Spring," came about when I rewrote a shaggy dog story based on the spoonerism, No wick for the rested.

At some point, I came up with another spoonerism: flutterby from butterfly. So when I wrote story in which Tom inherits the starship Marco Pollo, I decided to use a beginning in parallel with "The Winds of Spring." In "Winds," Tahiti carefully captures a moth hovering around a flame and tosses it out the window. In "A Many Splendored Thing," Tom does the same with a flutterby which he initially calls "Fido."

After writing "Splendored," I decided to provide Fido/Trittcha and her kind with some background, so I added a page about the Black Sapsuckers to my website and wrote "A Last Farewell." This story was critiqued by my friends in the South Arkansas Writers and rewritten.

It was one of the stories critiqued when I attended the Short Fiction Workshop at the University of Kansas. Again, it was rewritten, and eventually retitled, "Don't Think Twice."

The folks at "Perihelion" liked the story enough to put it out for others to enjoy.

Keep reading/keep writing - Jack