#sam lester

[larasramblings]

It's a Dale's Ramblings Christmas special, as we round out Volume Nine with a mammoth review of BBC Books' inaugural Short Trips collection. Nearly 17,000 words. Fifteen stories.

Merry Christmas, you lucky people.

BBC Short Trips Reviews: Short Trips, edited by Stephen Cole

And so, an ending. With the release of Short Trips, the BBC Books range has finally overcome one of the last major hurdles to its legitimacy

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[larasramblings]

OK I'm asking just to get ahead of it, but... can anyone even verify if Sam Lester, the credited author of the Short Trips story There Are Fairies at the Bottom of the Garden, actually exists?

And trust me, as someone who is well aware of fandom's tendency to go "Oh this writer dropped off the face of the Earth," I know this can get a bit overblown (cf. Neil Penswick, who by all accounts just decided to go into working for Ofsted). I am well-accustomed to having to dig a little bit in order to get any info about some of the writers for these short story anthologies, by their nature they tend to slip through the cracks a bit.

I only ask because I cannot find any other record of this guy writing *anything* else ever. It's his only credit on Goodreads and the ISFDB, and any hopes that his "About the Authors" blurb might shed some light on things are quickly quashed by... well, here's how it reads:

Which, y'know, cute, but also kind of maddening. Even the "contributors" who are confirmed to be pen names like "Paul Grice," "Tara Samms" and "Evan Pritchard" get a reasonably detailed blurb, so I have to wonder, like, what's the deal here?

(And again I wouldn't even question if "Sam Lester" existed if this wasn't a collection with four separate short stories written by pseudonymous authors as is.)

[samlesterwolf]

if sam lester had an instagram

[samlesterwolf]

"yeah, and you know what? control is overrated."