Most of the stories in this collection are awfully serious. My wife will tell you this one is more like the sort she figured I wrote when she first got to know me but hadn’t yet read any of my fiction.
How the world has changed since I wrote this in the mid-1980s. Back then, the phrase “snail mail” had barely been coined (not counting its earlier usage just after the telegram first came into wide use). It would be years more before I had an email account. The mail was the mail. It was a thing of paper and postage stamps. And if you were a freelance writer, it could be months or even years before publishers coughed up the payments that had long since fallen due.