Many years ago, when I was a young man, my mom told me a story from her childhood. It’s been so long that I don’t remember the context or what caused her to bring it up, but she told me she’d never told this story to anyone else. It was about the Stick Men. Of course, by that time I was hanging on every word. What followed was a general ghost story like the ones Grandpa tells, but it had some unusual additions. At the end I laughed and told her she’d dreamed it. She stood her ground and claimed it really happened. More than once. I’d never known my mother to lie to me about anything, so I chalked it up to “She believes it.”
We spoke of it once or twice over the next couple of decades. She said she wanted to write it down. While not highly educated, my mother was well read and held a professional job. She knew how to write. I encouraged her. After she died, I helped clean out her papers but never found any mention of the Stick Men.
Fast forward more years and I’ve discovered writing short stories. I was looking for inspiration for a story and thought about family myths. I wrote out a ghost story my grandfather liked to tell and it got accepted by a magazine. I decided to keep on down this road. My next try was The Stick Men. I wrote it just the way Mom told me, a simple spooky story, with the narrator running afoul of the ghosts at the end (obviously, Mom didn’t have that in her story, but this was fiction. I could say what I wanted.)
So I sent it around. Crickets. I wasn’t sure what the problem was. It was spooky, it was novel. Finally an anthology picked it up. Now I know publication is a waiting game, but a year went by and the anthology still hadn’t come out. I got an email from the editor about personal difficulties and then technical difficulties. At about a year and a half, I figured I’d put the story back into circulation. If anyone wanted it, I could just cancel with the anthology.
But rather than just toss the story back out there, I wanted to do some investigating into what was wrong with it. This is not an ad for critiquing software, but I had a popular one and some free credits for an in depth critique, so I pulled the trigger. I got several pages of commentary on where the story worked and a lot of info on where it didn’t. One of the biggest complaints was that I didn’t reveal what the Stick Men were. I don’t know what they were! Most likely the imaginings of a young girl. I put the complaint down to AI pedantics and rigid thinking. I mean the X-Files works and most of the time we didn’t know what the monsters were, and they kept us guessing about some of them for eleven seasons.
But I took a good look at the critique and set out repairing the story. I inserted a completely new middle section to put everything into context. I even came up with a reasonable explanation for what they were (well, reasonable is a relative term in horror tropes). I took all these changes to my writing group and got a crowd sourced critique. The finished product was twice as long but so much more than just a story of things that go bump in the night. It was a Southern gothic bonanza of murder, secrets, madness, and generational guilt. Flannery O’Connor would probably be proud.
This was a story I’d be happy to send around. Then I got the email that the anthology was a go, along with a copy of my original story for my review. Crap.
After some consideration I contacted the editor and asked if they had room for my longer version. I explained the differences. Unfortunately, they had no leeway. Then the editor made an offer. He said if I believed in my story then we’d make a deal. He would pull the story from the upcoming anthology, and give a similar length story the spot. Then he’d feature my story in next year’s anthology. I readily agreed. He said to send my story along on the regular submission form. “Don’t worry,” he wrote. “It’s already accepted.”
So when it comes out in 2026 I’ll give everybody a shout to check out my gothic tour de force.
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