Richard Schiver

The first time would be 1991. I was thirty two, a voracious reader, and the idea of writing had been in the back of my mind since my days in the military.

Starting out was a struggle. My first story was rejected so many times I ran out of markets to submit it to. But I stuck with it. Eventually things started to click, the words started to flow, and the amount of work I was producing grew. The rejections soon changed from form rejections to personal notes from editors, then an acceptance here, another over there. Small non-paying markets.

Ten years later with the first drafts of seven novels on my hard drive, one under consideration at Random House, six screenplays, and about fifty short stories in various stages of revision my computer crashed, wiping the hard drive clean, and no I didn't have any backups, with the exception of a few I had printed out.

I was so discouraged by what had happened that I turned my back on writing for the next seven years. But in the back of my mind I always wondered if I had given up too easily. In 2008 I began the arduous task of replacing what work I could from the printed stories I'd saved. This was my second excursion into writing and has resulted in me finding myself here.

We all view grandmothers as nurturing, caring, individuals more inclined to pinch a child's cheeks than anything else. It's a view that causes us to let our guard down. But not everything we perceive can be trusted. As many of Margaret's victims learn too late in my novella, Reprisal: Vengeance knows no boundary. But what motivates her? She'd been diagnosed as a child with Dissociative Identity Disorder, but the doctors were wrong.