The Shift (With Writing Insights from the Author)

Introduction

One of the great benefits of writing short stories is that you can practice your craft on a smaller scale. It's one thing to spend an evening writing a 1,000 word flash fiction piece, then realizing it doesn't work and needs to be tossed or rewritten from scratch, and another thing entirely to spend months or years writing a 100,000 word novel and coming to the same conclusion.

I once had an idea about a man who is flung to alternate universes whenever his life is endangered. I was so excited by the idea that I wrote it out at the next opportunity. It became an 1,800 word story called On the Night of the Full Moon, You Will Hear a Werewolf Howl.

It took several years, and more than 20 rejections from various magazines I submitted it to for possible publication, before I accepted that the story wasn't working. In fact, it wasn't a story.

I tossed aside On the Night of the Full Moon... and, using the same idea, began work on a new story. The finished draft of The Shift was 9,000 words long, which I trimmed down over several editing passes.

Whether The Shift is any good as a story I will let you decide for yourself, but it's undeniably better than the flash fiction piece it replaced.

What was so wrong with On the Night of the Full Moon... and why is The Shift a better story? I detail my answer in the afterword to this book.

First, though, you'll find the final published version of The Shift, followed by the last draft, before I retired it, of On the Night of the Full Moon, You Will Hear a Werewolf Howl.

Karl El-Koura

Ottawa, Ontario

December 2022

The Shift

On the drive home after dinner out with his family, Jesse Sonat reflected that the hobby—obsession, his wife said—of the Jesse Sonat of this world was one of the best he'd encountered: buying rusted classic cars at auction, fixing them up, and selling them at a significant profit after enjoying them himself for a while. He drove the beautifully-restored '66 Porsche Leverett under the moonlit sky, his wife in the passenger bucket seat, head resting on her arm as her reddish-brown hair waved in the wind from the open window, their daughter in the back seat singing along to the Raffi songs incongruously playing out of the booming bass speakers of this mechanical wonder.

He drove slowly, given the road conditions, but infuriating the pick-up truck that repeatedly sped up to within kissing distance of his bumper before backing off again.

Staring in the rearview, he began to say something to Leslie about the truck, when the tires slipped out from under his control, the car spun, and the headlights of the F-150 made him shield his eyes reflexively just before the two cars slammed into each other.

He tried to scream out—No! Not with them!—but he'd already