Short-fiction redux…
After finishing the manuscripts for The Last Humans (a post-apocalyptic thriller to be published by Black Opal Books in 2019), Goin’ the Extra Mile (“Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” #3, to be published by Carrick Publishing this fall), and Son of Thunder (sequel/prequel to Rembrandt’s Angel, back from editors and beta-readers and in the submission prcess), I’ve decided to spend a bit more time on short fiction, encouraged by A. B. Carolan, my Irish collaborator.
I just uploaded The Phantom Harvester to my OneDrive folder (see the web page “Free Stuff & Contests” for download directions—there’s more free short fiction PDFs in that folder too). It’s a novella about Cecilia and Pedro Castilblanco, Detective Castilblanco’s adopted kids. They’re not mentioned in either Rembrandt’s Angel or The Golden Years of Virginia Morgan, another two spin-offs from the “Detectives Chen and Castilblanco Series,” so readers might be interested that Ceci becomes a CSI and Pedrito becomes a cop like his father. Here they end up working on the same case.
My short fiction either goes into my OneDrive folder now or the blog category “Steve’s Shorts” (A. B. Carolan has his own blog category for the same purpose, “ABC Shorts”). There are multiple reasons for this, but the major reason is to provide some freebies to readers hoping that they’ll become interested in my novels. (Neither A. B. nor I give away our novels, except to reviewers.)
I’ve had a few authors tell me this is silly. Publishing is a business after all. My counter argument is pretty weak: it’s as much trouble to peddle short fiction as it is to do so for a novel, usually more so. Moreover, ‘zines, whether traditional paper or online, pay very little for short fiction. Of course, another counter argument is some of these same authors offer free novels, which is even sillier (I’m not speaking to free review copies here).
I’ve always enjoyed writing short fiction, though, and I can speedily write a short story or novella, which I’d rather be doing rather than spending time querying ‘zines and asking them to publish them. And, when I start a story, I never know whether it will end as a novel—a lot of my writing becomes short fiction because I think there’s just not enough there to make a novel.
You might say to me, “Take a bunch of short fiction and make a collection.” Been there, done that (see, for example, Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape)—it doesn’t pay either, financially for royalties or for the time and money spent. Moreover, not many people read short fiction anymore. You might read a short story in some ‘zine sometime (at a doctor or dentist’s office?), but its author either had more perseverance than I do, or s/he had good connections, or s/he was very lucky. (‘Zine editors are generally worse than literary agents and acquisition editors for wasting an author’s time.)
So, for now, I’ll be writing short fiction and you can read it for free. If you like the former, please try some of my novels. The same guy is writing them, after all.
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Pasodobles in a Quantum Stringscape. This collection of speculative fiction contains short stories and a novella. The shorts cover ghosts, zombies, and sci-fi, some humorous, others not so much. Most of the Dr. Carlos stories—he’s the medical officer on the starship Brendan—are also found here. The novella is “Flight from Mother World,” the story of how the ETs from the second book of the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” arrived in the 83 Eridani solar system before human colonists. Great late summer and fall reading.
There’s one review of this collection on Goodreads. Be the first to review on Amazon. How do you review a collection? Maybe select some of your favorite stories from it and tell other readers (and me!) what you liked about them?
In libris libertas…
