During the late 1980s and early 1990s, I was a prolific short story writer. I have dozens of them cluttering up computer disks (some of them on those old 3x5 floppies – yes, I am old!) Only about a third of them were published, most in small literary magazines that are probably out of business by now. The other two-thirds I had never even tried to have published. I was more chicken back then. I’m a better writer now than I was then, but still – some of these stories are really quite good. They just needed a bit of tweaking here and there. (In the eighties there was no Internet to speak of. Few people had cell phones. Mr. Rogers was still alive. It’s surprising how much these cultural changes can impact a story.) A few months ago I took one of my old unsubmitted, unpublished stories to my writing group and asked for critique. I was amazed at how positive they were, and how many good suggestions they had about how to rework the story so it didn’t seem dated. Suddenly I saw that my...