The original plan, as plans often do, went awry. Two of the stories I had hoped to include with the print edition of the novella, I Am William McGuire, did not work out as hoped. Most of the shorter material I write is intended as backgound or continuity for novels–stories within the story–and one of those novels, A Young Man From Mars, is one of the oldest of the unpublished works precisely because the internal stories that make it whole are not yet satisfactory to me. I have made the point elsewhere that I believe the novel is best when it reflects the whole of a human life, and that plot should be a natural outgrowth of a life and the way it is lived, or of several lives, and not superimposed. Each of us is a creature of a plot of our own making. What we are born with and the accidents that befall us are only the raw material. How we choose to deal with or avoid those motivations is our story.
The two novellas, I Am William McGuire and If Blood Were Orange, were written originally as screenplays, but as time passed and I began to accept the fact that I would never be able to see them finished that way, I completed them instead as they are now. She Knows Her Onions was a story I took out of The Dark Heart of Night to keep the book a more reasonable length. That Little Old Lady and Me was intended as a part of John Finn but in the end I thought unnecessary to that effort, though still fun, in and of itself. Seely’s Surfside is a key moment from a novel that will never be completed for other more complicated reasons.
In any case, these stories, long on my website, are now available in print through the Great and Mighty Amazon at https://www.amazon.com/William-McGuire-other-unexpected-stories/dp/0989790363/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=I+Am+William+McGuire&qid=1600286701&s=books&sr=1-1