my personal database involves a book keeping utility for stories I’ve read. I particularly enjoy anthologies & thus have created a form that accepts a single anthologyTitle & th numerous shortStoryTitles attached to it. I’d like to be certain that it is an update query that should be behind my form or something.

I'm not really sure that I understand the question so I'm just going to tell you what I think the structure should be. You have a one-to-many relationship so there should be two tables. One to hold information about the book and the second to hold information about the stories in the anthology. The mainform would show the book and a subform would show the short stories. Both forms should use queries as their recordsources. As long as the forms are bound, the forms will automatically update the underlying tables.