On Love, Loss, Walking Again: The Collected Short Fiction of Nicholas J. Shabrack — 19971998

These eight stories were written between 1997 and 1998, when I was a college student in a Creative Writing: Fiction workshop. They were typed on a word processor, printed out, marked up by a teacher, scanned years later, and carried around long enough to fade and stain at the corners of the pages. I wanted to keep them honest. The voice that wrote these stories was a younger me - gritty, messy, raw, sometimes reaching past what I knew how to say. I didn't want to clean that out of them. So this book holds two versions of every story, side by side. The Rough Drafts are the originals - preserved with their typos, run-ons, missing commas, and impossible dialogue tags. They are the page as I first put it on the page, the way 21-year-old Nick would have wanted you to see it before anyone else got their hands on it. Where my teacher left a note, the note is here too. The Final Drafts are the published versions. They keep my voice and my plot, but I've fixed the spelling, smoothed the grammar, untangled the punctuation, and trusted the reader more than I knew how to back then. Side by side, they show the long road from a young writer's first draft to something I'm proud to put my name on now. Thank you for reading. Some of these stories are about love, and some are about violence, and some are about a kid who watches the world fall apart and decides what to do with the pieces. They are still, in a way, all the same story. - Nicholas J. Shabrack May 2026