Short story month

[thexmedic]

Originally published at Cogs & Neurons. You can comment here or there.

I saw somewhere on the web that May is short story month.  So I thought, oh that would be a good opportunity to share some stuff.  And then I wandered into the bibliography section of this site and discovered a wilderness of horrors.  It’s like the garden in that creepy house down the street, where everything is overgrown and tangled, and is probably just hiding the bodies.



Like this, but SO MUCH worse

Anyway, I stumbled through it, cursing at the brambles and nettles, and recovered what I could.

1. The Mathematics of Faith - a long one, but still probably the best received of my short stories.  It Beneath Ceaseless Skies’ Best of Year One anthology, so that was nice.
2. Preservation - also up at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. One of my creepier ones and by bizarre coincidence the one story that most of my wife’s family has read.
3. Debut-de-siecle - one of my early attempts at the postmodern detective story. I’m unconvinced if it really works as a whole, but I think it still has its moments.
4. Between The Lines - an early and slightly experimental one.  Possibly the second or third story I published.  This was a lot of fun to write.
5. Ephemera - And this was, I think, the last short story I wrote.  Plus the most aggressively postmodern.  It will probably annoy people who have only read No Hero.  And they will probably be right to be annoyed.  Not a user-friendly tale.  But it was fun to push boundaries.

There are also all the flash pieces up The Daily Cabal.  All of them 400 words or less.  For the dedicated reader, the whole list is here, but honestly the quality varies a lot.  If you are committed to reading some flash fiction that I wrote, here are my suggestions:

1. A Fantasy of Hope
2. Beauty and the Beast
3. Kid Things
4. Original Sin
5. Scary Monsters
6. The Beak-Faced Girl
7. The Gun Overheats

And that’s it.  Which is actually more than I thought.  Sad to see the internet has laid somethings down by the wayside.  Though I still have the original documents.  I’ll have to check contracts and see if I can get anything else up here.

Anyway, hope there’s something in there for some people, and that more folk see more short stories this month.