Short Stories

 

I’ve thought about doing a collection of short fiction for a long time, but ever got around to it for various reasons. I’ve always been more comfortable with novels, and wrote stories for the magazines because that was how one broke into the field, back in the day. Sell some, use those to get an agent, write a novel, get that in front a book publisher, that was the standard route, when I was still young, before the internet.

Fifty years ago.

 Ray Bradbury, in The Zen of Writing, said if you wrote a short story a week for twenty years, you’d get pretty good at it. 

I can do that, I thought.

I was wrong. 

I cranked out one a week for forty weeks, then crashed—I was no Ray Bradbury. It did put me into the magazines after a few months—and a few hundred rejections—that first year.

Early on, I sold but one in four, and the rest went into a file drawer, to be mined for ideas later. Or maybe another shot at them when I had a few more chops.

When I started writing books, I stopped writing short stories. Didn’t have the time, and what it cost to do one was more work than a chapter in the novel-in-progress, and worth less money anyhow. For me, it’s a harder form, the shorter stuff.

However: The odd—sometimes very—odd idea for a story would burble up unbidden and unwanted from the swamp in my brain—usually when I was on a novel deadline with no time for such foolishness—and these wild hairs demanded that I pluck them. I’d write a draft in a white-heat, touch it up and send it off, and because all these seemed passing strange to me, I never expected any of them to sell.

All of them sold—which surprised me no end. 

So, they’ve piled up. A collection of all my short stories would be a fat volume, but I can pick enough of them to keep it manageable.

Anyway, in the middle of the WIP novel, this idea I don’t have time to fool with burbled up. 

It's time to do a short story collection.

So …

Won’t need much editing, since most of them have been published before. Homogenize ‘em together, add short afterwords for each, run them through Vellum, use one of my clever covers, and zap! a batch of my more recent—and better-written—tales.  

I’m gonna do it. 

Stay tuned ...