Just a reminder. The Heinlein Short Story Contest closes one minute after midnight June 1. If you have a story, ship it off NOW!!! They take email entries. (That means that you have to press the send button in May.)

I sent off a story, The Window Washer Murder, that I’d almost forgotten about. When I started writing stories, about five years ago, I wrote a number of stories about a robot detective named Mark Denker. One of these appeared in Aoife’s Kiss and several others wound up eventually on low end zines. Robot detectives are a tough sell, it seems. I gave up on this story, although it was the best of the bunch. It is full of ideas borrowed from Heinlein, in fact I found a line in the story that was lifted (unintentionally) from The Door Into Summer. I reworded it to keep the Heinlein-esque idea without being a direct quote.

The Heinlein contest will report by the end of the year, so I expect I will have a summer and fall of chewed fingernails. Some big name authors have entered, so my own little story probably won’t be able to climb out of the slush. Luckily, Spider Robinson will probably be a judge, so my story won’t have to compete with one of his. No one writes more like Heinlein than Spider.

Centennial Short Story Contest