On Short Fiction...
As long-time readers of this space now, in the past few years, I've rediscovered a love of short stories. Now, I've never been anti-short story - I've read a lot of great shorts throughout my life, and there's a lot of writers I like that I think tend to work better in short stories than novels. Coincidentally, a lot of them tend to be American authors: Poe, King, Salinger, and Hemingway, for example.
A problem I found, though, when buying short story anthologies or magazines is that you tend to end up reading a lot of stuff you don't like - I would usually find I would really like around 20% of the stories in any given collection, actively dislike another 20%, and be ambivalent about the rest. That's not to say they were bad stories, of course - just that they weren't for me. I've come to rationalize it as short story collections being like recipe books - nobody's going to want to cook every recipe in a book, but every now and then you're going to find a recipe or three that you absolutely love in a book. Even with that rationalization, though, those aren't numbers that would encourage one to buy more short story collections.
It's ironic, in a way, because given how much ink has been spilled in the last decade on how short people's attention spans have gotten, you would think that the short story would be thriving as an art form - that people would be flocking towards short stories and ignoring novels, because our video game- and music video-addled brains shouldn't be able to hold a narrative over the course of a whole book, never mind a series of books, right? Instead, though, I've been hearing a lot about how people think the short story market is dying, and how new authors should avoid writing short stories.
Presumably, though, the short story is dying in the same way that the sitcom died a decade ago, and how rock and roll dies off at least once a decade, because I've finding a lot of great short fiction on the internet. A lot of this is in genre-specific podcasts like the CrimeWAV and Escape Pod, but also in individual authors posting their work online. Two authors that I've been following with interest on the “short fiction on the internet” are Jennifer Hudock and James Melzer. They're people who I encountered through their podcasting of novels, and lately they've also been branching out into releasing short fiction online, using smashwords.com* as a distribution method, which is a great idea. And, true to form, I'm finding some of the short fiction they're releasing on their smashwords sites to be even more interesting - Melzer's got this great knack for modern horror with a twist of the Twilight Zone, and Hudock is really good at creating evocative, descriptive environments filled with familiar monsters like ghosts and zombies that make them seem fresh. At $.99 US per story, they're definitely worth checking out.
In fact, I think this is such a great idea, that I'm going to blatantly steal it. I've got a growing number of short stories that I've been writing over the past couple of years; I've been sending some of them out, and have mostly been hearing that “It's not that we don't like it, it's just that it's not for us.” It's also been almost three years since I've released any substantial fiction of my own online. So, I'm going to be releasing a six-pack of short fiction this summer, once per fortnight, starting in June. More details to come, including details on formats and all that, once I've got them sorted out.
*incidentally, if you're an ebook fan, smashwords is a great site to find work by independent authors - they offer DRM-free ebooks in a variety of popular formats. And I'm not just saying that because I have a few of my own works available on smashwords!