Grab Bag 7

Habu’s Grab Bag 7, representing standalone short stories habu wrote in the winter of 2014–15, is the latest in a series of short story anthologies with eclectic gay male settings and plotlines presented in the order in which they were delivered to habu by his muse, within the period since the previous Grab Bag collection was assembled. In addition to random stories streaming down from habu’s muse, this collection includes stories written for themed and seasonal contests. Variety and setting are always important in habu’s stories, and, as usual, the settings of these stories span the globe, from such settings as the Carolina coasts; Mystic, Connecticut; the Mid-Atlantic states; Ohio; the Colorado Rockies; and Albuquerque in the United States to the United Kingdom, Australia, and China. The time periods also vary. Although most of these stories are set in the present, one moves to cowboy country in the early 1900s and others take the reader to Broadway in the 1960s and Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the 1970s. And, as always, there are unusual stories that take fresh approaches to men taking their pleasure with other men.The overarching motivation for a habu story is that it try to be different in some way from ones he has written before, a tall order for a writer who has some 800 short stories published, but a goal we think has been achieved here. As with the previous Grab Bag series, we hope that readers will find stories to entertain, arouse, and evoke thought in this collection.