A COLLECTION OF SHORT CONTEMPORARY STORIES
Featuring the Novella: INTO TILOVIA
By
James W. Nelson
Dedicated to all my best friends; you know who you are.
INTRODUCTION
These are stories taken from not only imagination but personal experience with a whole lot of imagination added. Dozens, hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of occurrences happen every day, every minute, and there is a short story hidden in each one. I am one of the lucky ones who can see that hidden short story, imagine how it could happen differently, take a note or two (I almost always have a tiny notebook and pen on me, and if I don’t I’ll take a napkin, a piece of newspaper, even my hand to write on, and I’ll attempt to borrow a pen from anyone who’s near me from an elegant-looking lady to the scariest-looking guy you can imagine!—I’ve even been known to buy a pen; I must write down that note or two!) and then, on the way home, I’ll scribble more on whatever is handy, and when I get home, I’ll dro
p every other household chore—including eating—until I’ve gotten those first thoughts safely stored on my hard drive. It used to be harder: I’d have to write everything down by hand and then get to the manual typewriter (In those days I could write by hand faster than I could type.) But once those basic notes were down I could take it from there. A novel develops a little differently, a lot more slowly, but that’s a whole other story.
BIOGRAPHY
James W. Nelson was born in a little farmhouse on the prairie in 1944 (many doctors made house calls in those days) and has been telling stories most of his life.  Some of his first memories happened during recess in a one-room country schoolhouse near Walcott, North Dakota.  His little friends, eyes wide, would gather round and listen to every hastily-imagined word.  It was a beginning.  Fascinated by the world beginning to open, he remembers listening to the teacher read to all twelve kids in the eight grades. The first two books he read himself were Forest Patrol and On the Fur Trail.  In the tenth grade, he read Swiftwater, by Paul Annixter, which Disney immortalized as Those Calloways.  Other than school papers, though, writing held off until the navy, where he kept a sparse journal.  But the memory banks were beginning to fill.  About 1968 he interviewed his family and got their recollections of the 1955 tornado.  His first piece and immediately rejected by Reader’s Digest.  But the vein had be
a sort of的用法en opened. His first novel (still in unfinished hard copy) became a thousand-page behemoth, “hand-typed” four times. Then an electric—will wonders never cease?—typewriter, and two more drafts.  The first computer arrived about 1980 (typewriter and monitor).  One click and a correction got made, and the story got typed automatically, but, still, one page at a time. The next three novels and about forty short stories came quickly. Because the story subjects are so different he uses three pen names.  He has published two short stories in small press magazines and won three short story contests (Falls Writers Workshop, Ohio). DYING TO LIVE (an autobiography) is his first book in his own name. A COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY SHORT STORIES is his second.
CONTENTS
THIRTY SECONDS TO THE GROUND
A skydive gone really bad.
MY HUSBAND, MY HERO
A nursing home love affair.
GEEK OF THE ROAD
Believe it or not, the geek sometimes gets the girl.
FOR A CUP OF COFFEE
Really, how much is a cup of coffee worth? For your sanity, sometimes quite a bit.
THE REAL MEANING OF A QUARTER
One shiny little quarter can mean the difference between a good day, and a really bad
one.
DON’T GET TOO CLOSE
A nursing home resident goes from down, to way up, to really down, in the space of a couple hours.
THE ONE WHO LOVES ME
A little girl is the only one who knows who she should go live with.
GIRLFRIEND FOR MOTHER
Sometimes a friend asked to help can become much more than a friend.
WAITING TO DIE
For a thousand years mankind has feared the pandemic, an extraordinarily-mutated virus, that vicious creature that cannot be seen by the naked eye.
ONE DAY AT BOXELDER COVE
A young red squirrel learns a whole lot about life and survival.
HE HAD IT COMING
A boss gets murdered, and nobody, not his family, and not even one employee is sorry.
INTO TILOVIA
Nobody was helping the Tilovians; seven friends decide it’s time somebody did.

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