Jake Kerr claimed that he isn’t funny.
I kept prodding him to write and submit a story to UFO on Twitter and he said that he wasn’t funny. Others chimed in. Ken Liu said: “How can that be? Your Tweets are funny!”
And that’s when the inspiration struck him.
I woke up to find a story he wrote the night before in my inbox. The entire story was told through Tweets. And it was hilarious. I showed it to the Associate Editors, but I pretty much knew I would be buying it. So when the time came to inform Jake of the good news, I sent him the acceptance message via Twitter. It seemed only fair.
Jake Kerr began writing short fiction in 2010, after fifteen years as a music industry columnist and journalist. In 2011, Lightspeed published his debut story, The Old Equations, in its July issue. The story went on to be finalist for best novelette at the Nebula Awards and shortlisted for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. In 2012, Kerr returned to Lightspeed with a new story and was also published in Fireside Magazine. A graduate of Kenyon College with degrees in English and Psychology, Kerr studied under writer-in-residence Ursula K. Le Guin and Peruvian playwright Alonso Alegria. He is currently working on his first novel. Kerr lives in Dallas, Texas.
This is where I’d normally preview a snippet of Jake’s story. But he and I had a better idea. We will post the entire story — for free — as a preview of the kind of stuff you can expect in UFO, sometime in the next month or so (once the official UFO web site goes live). Watch this space for updates, you don’t want to miss this story!
Alex Shvartsman's Speculative Fiction 