Eric James Stone

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from Kevin J. Anderson, whom I met the first time I went to the Writers of the Future workshop and have seen several times since. Kevin is editing an anthology of humorous horror called Blood Lite, and he wanted to know if I could write funny horror, and if so, if I could write a story within the next month. I told him I could.

I wrote a story over the next week, then revised it based on very helpful suggestions from my writers’ groups. On Friday, I sent the story to Kevin.

Today he accepted it for the anthology. That means I now have four new stories scheduled to come out next year, which will make 2008 my most successful publishing year so far. That’s good, because 2007 was kind of lean, with only one new story published.

Oh, and the reason this blog post is titled “P.R. Problems” is because that’s the name of the story.

OK, so maybe I have a little more to say about it.

I’m the kind of BYU fan who would rather see a BYU blowout than an exciting, close game.

But I wasn’t expecting a blowout today. Nine out of the ten previous BYU-Utah games had been decided by a touchdown or less, and I didn’t expect anything different this time.
When BYU is down but close near the end of the game, I always believe they might pull off the comeback. That’s why I almost always stay to the end of the game.

Today, as BYU faced 4th and 18 from their own 12 yard line with about a minute left, I took hope from a successful 4th-and-20* conversion in the final minutes of the 2000 BYU-Utah game. And my faith was rewarded as Max Hall’s 49-yard pass to Austin Collie elated the stadium. Harvey Unga’s touchdown run shortly thereafter ended up winning the game.

*Update: My memory was faulty. It was only a 4th and 13 in the 2000 game.

Having seen various friends on LiveJournal posting their results, I decided to give it a try. Considering that I moved around a lot growing up, I guess it pegged me correctly.