Robert Sheckley Stories

I Was Lucky to Call Bob A Friend…

Robert Sheckley lived in Portland when Kris and I were in Eugene and he wrote for me in Pulphouse and often just dropped by the offices. Many, many fun dinners with Bob over the years before he left Portland and we lost touch in his last few years.

At Pulphouse Publishing, one night over dinner, we decided with Bob that it would be fun to do the “Selected Short Fiction of Robert Sheckley.” Huge books with introductions from other great writers and friends of Bobs like Harlan Ellison. (If you ever get the chance to read the Sheckley/Ellison collaboration short story called “I See a Man Sitting On a Chair, And the Chair is Biting His Leg” don’t hesitate. Two masters working at the top of their forms.

Bob and I and Kris compiled the five volumes and Kris got the introductions and she edited everything and the books were already being printed when one day Bob showed up in my office and said, “I forgot about some short stories I did for this radio station. Can we still add them?”

I asked “How many?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I would have to find them. Maybe around sixty or so short stories. I forgot I had done those.”

That would have been an entire sixth book or more. It was too late.  I don’t know if he ever found them. He never said.

But as a young writer, I was both stunned and impressed that a writer could just forget about writing that many short stories.

Fast forward 40 plus years. Today, all day, I have been putting collections together of my short fiction challenge, fighting to find stories that I had records of writing, mad at myself for my lack of organization over the years.

Then, as I am looking through a file to see what it was, there was a folder called “January” and nothing more. I clicked on it and inside were 31 short stories I had written some January as a challenge to start my year. You guessed it. I had forgotten all about them and they were not in my master spread sheet of my short fiction.

And that reminded me of that meeting with Robert Sheckley in my office at Pulphouse one fine afternoon and how, as a young writer, I was surprised and shocked at how he could just forget he wrote a bunch of stories. After all, I was still young enough to believe that stories were special, that all of mine should be remembered.

But now I write not for others to read the stories, but because I love to tell stories. I love the process. Bob was the same way.

So looks like I now have at least three more 10-story collections. And I feel very honored in a very strange way that I am similar in any way to Bob. He was a great person and an amazing writer and I was honored to work with him and call him a friend.