Teens Make Me Tense—Very Short Stories (an Introduction)

I am a word smith.  By day I'm a technical writer, weaving threads of complicated scientific technique with strands of standard operating procedure—throwing in a dash of proper grammar for good measure.  At night I write fiction, trying to find the perfect match between what my imagination conjures up and what I think a reader will want to read.  Both require getting words down on paper in a pleasing sequence before they slip my fingers' ability to race across the keyboard. Sometimes, as I write, I examine the words that flow through my consciousness.  I take a few seconds to ponder the way a word looks or sounds.  I wonder why a word is spelled the way it's spelled.  Every so often I come across a unique word and discover that other words live inside it.  That is where the seed for this collection began.

Technically speaking, of course, I'm referring to anagrams.  An anagram is a word made from another word by rearranging its letters.  The two words are often related in some manner to one another, sometimes similar in definition, sometimes quite opposite.  I'm constantly amazed at some of the anagrammic pairs across which I stumble.  Take for example "words" and its anagrammic cousin "sword."  In our daily lives we often compare a thing that has two contrasting characteristics to a "double-edged sword."  Certain unique anagrammic word pairs can share this property of having radically different meanings.

What follows is a sampling of my favorite anagrammic pairs.  I have used glimpses of modern day life, many inspired by Aesop's Fables, to help illustrate the irony or the humor of many of the pairings.  May these anagrams set your mind wondering, as they did mine, where words come from and who thought them up.

This collection of one-page short stories will be submitted to my publisher at some point in late 2024 or early 2025.  Watch this space for details.