A New Collection of Short Stories and Flash Fiction Released - Summer Reading List

Find the key emotion; this may be all you need know to find your short story.”
– F. Scott Fitzgerald

“A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick – a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.”
– Neil Gaiman

“I even start novels. But something happens to them. They break up.”
– Alice Munro

The short story is once more in vogue. After Alice Munro, a short story author from Canada, won the Nobel Prize for literature at age 82– the short story seems to be experiencing a renaissance.

Every story has a life span. Whether that happens to be a novel, novella, short, or what has more recently arisen in the literary arts: flash fiction, each has its purpose and its format. Each is an art form. Like poetry. A short offers less meat and more action to get from beginning to middle to end. Flash offers even less to digest and puts you right in the action whereas a novel can meander and take its time with character development and placing the reader in the scene.

“As many author’s do, I have my own slush pile,” explains Poeltl, “I knew the vast majority of my random scenes and false starts wouldn’t sustain novel length works, and I realized that literary shorts play an important role for the reader. Many of the stories within the pages of my own anthology are such refugees. At least, that’s how they’d begun their literary lives: a thought, a quote, a supposition.”  Poeltl has since revised and edited, lengthened or shortened, these scenes, and added fresh stories and narratives to accompany them in their own multi-genre book: Waning Metaphorically.

Poeltl states in the Forward of his new collection: Life is a Metaphor. A metaphor is a symbol. A symbol is a sign. Watch for the signs. Like all stories, they can be watered-down to act as metaphor or parables; but unlike parables, metaphors can be interpreted differently, depending on the subject. A waning metaphor therefore, only sustains resolve if a person decides to recognize it.

So enjoy the instant gratification shorts offer in their ability to disclose the intimate secrets of a life or lives in not so many words.

Pick up your Pre-order Kindle Version today!

Short Stories and Their Relevance in Today's Market

So I've been asking a few writing and publishing groups on LinkedIn about their opinion of the short story.  I wanted to research this subject before committing to a published anthology of my own shorts and flash fiction. This post will cover a few things my research has unearthed, and from it you can draw your own conclusions on the short story's relevance.

There was a time when newspapers published serials. The greats like Charles Dickens and Poe were fond of these. Money was to be made as well! Then magazines became the popular medium to carry the short story. Buying shorts to include into a genre specific magazine was a major draw for readers.
Both have seemingly lost their punch. But the short story lives on.

Websites like Wattpad carry millions of short stories and serials from authors hoping to be discovered. No one is getting paid for these, but paying sites do still exist. Besides, writing short stories are meant to bring in an audience rather than make you money right?

Wrong. The short story is an art form. It won the Nobel Prize last year for literature. It's not playing second fiddle to novels, and never has. In fact the short has been experiencing a renaissance of sorts recently. Even the film industry has been picking up shorts because a 500 page and up novel is much more difficult to write into a script than a 20-80 page story.

Fan fiction is a great way to enter the short story market too. I wrote a short concerning a character in my trilogy, The Judas Syndrome, which told the story as seen through her eyes after book three had ended. I wrote it in just twelve pages.

The problem with selling your short stories one by one via Amazon and Smashwords is that many self-published authors are selling their novels for $0.99, and the majority of readers look for deals. Multiple consumer studies in 2013 and 2014 confirmed that readers won't spend the money for a short versus a full-length. So your short story, though every bit as good, if not better than a novel, only offers 20 to 80 pages of literary bliss while the novel is 200 and up.

The fix? Put your shorts and flash fiction into a collection. An anthology. Find the stories that share a common theme or genre and sell them as a package deal. Now you're attracting the larger audience to your works.

My own collection will be available very soon, and will be found in both paperback and ebook formats, entitled: Waning Metaphorically. Follow this blog or find me on Facebook and Twitter, Goodreads, linkedIn and Google+