Cicada Children is a short story collection that includes stories that I wrote in college. One of them is called Iridescent and it, in a slightly different form, won my college’s undergraduate fiction writing contest. So there you go: I’m an award-winning writer. That story was never presented in my creative writing classes, though. The others were, with vastly varying degrees of helpfulness. If you know anything about college creative writing workshops, you’ll see that a lot of these stories are… not really what they’re looking for. Oh well— the stories are lot of fun, in my opinion!
Cicada Children is a green book. It was important that a green book come second. However, it offers plenty of other colors as well.
The title story occupies a special place in my heart because it was the first story I ever wrote for a workshop. The story makes this quite obvious— there’s more shooting in it that story than in all my classmates in all my classes’ other stories combined. Then in some other stories there is even more action. However, I think there is still plenty of interiority going on in some of these.
Gabe Gomez reappears a few times here, but as an adult instead of a kid. His cousin Randy is the protagonist of Make It Happen, but he’s better known as the hero of my novel A Good Creature.
It bugs me that the last two stories somewhat resemble Stranger Things even though I wrote them years before that show came out. LOL!
Cicada Children can be bought here.
Here is a list of this collection’s stories:
1. “Iridescent”
2. “Cicada Children”
3. “Make It Happen”
4. “Dent”
5. “Morass”
6. “Very Special Weapons”
7. “Cat Claws”
8. “Cat Claws II”
9. “Messenger One”
10. “Messenger One II”