Free Fiction Downloads
"The Surfman."
The market for historical short fiction is so small as to be almost nonexistent, so we didn't find a home for "The Surfman," a historical short story we originally wrote while at Orson Scott Card's 2004 Literary Boot Camp. This version is quite a bit shorter than the original version (which was 10,000 words in less than 24 hours, thank you); though, since the market for novel-length historical fiction is quite robust we might've had better luck if we expanded it into a novel.
"The Surfman" is the story of a wounded Civil War veteran who joins the U.S. Life-Saving Service. The Life-Saving Service was the forerunner of the U.S. Coast Guard, and operated stations along most of the east coast to rescue shipwrecked sailors and passengers.
Download PDF: "The Surfman"
In the summer of 2009, we visited the Chicamacomico Life-Saving Station on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and it was fascinating to go up in the watch tower, visit the boat house, and look at the Lyle gun and other implements they used to rescue people from stranded vessels. We had learned earlier that surfmen from the Kitty Hawk station helped the Wright brothers set up for their flight attempts, so the USLSS played a large part in our vacation. Our visit to the station prompted us to send a copy of the story to the Chicamacomico staff in August 2009, with our compliments.