HAPPY HOLIDAYS! Against my better judgment, for a gift I give you this Christmas story — “Dear Santa” — a long lost manuscript of the very first horror story I ever sold (to GAS magazine in 1989), but which ultimately never saw print. On the one hand, this is old and amateur enough to be most embarrassing. On the other hand, I think I’ve made a career of embarrassing myself. Enjoy?
“Dear Santa” – a lost 1989 manuscript by Michael Arnzen
(If you cannot read the above, see if you can click on the “view fullscreen” link at the top of the reader. Or just head on over to scribd.com, a neat site for document sharing that I have just joined. Comments, “follows” and offers to buy my old manuscripts for heaps of gold bullion are always more than welcome!)
Have a great holiday season…
Update, Xmas 2011: Yesterday I learned from a good writing friend that this story — which bears a copyright protection symbol on scribd — was illegally reprinted (e.g. without my permission) along with tales by dozens of others in a pirated ebook called “Gift Wrapped and Toe-Tagged.” If you ever see that book, DO NOT BUY OR DOWNLOAD. It is like a Santa’s bag filled with stolen property. This sort of thing is exactly why I don’t publish more fiction online, and why I generally oppose the scan-and-archive approach to digitizing books that is happening by the likes of amazon and google.
Even so, it’s kind of ironic that this story — which was my first ever accepted for publication but which never saw print — has this weird second life.
— Mike Arnzen