Short Story Collections

I finished both the rough draft and the 2nd draft of First to Find during the month of May, so when June rolled around, I wanted a change of pace.

A big change of pace.

I went back through all the short stories I'd ever written (some published, some never submitted, some with a nice list of rejection slips), and decided to let others read them without asking the magazines for permission first. I had right around fifty stories just lying around, with no one to read them. And as one who write simply for the love of stories, that seemed wrong somehow.

So I collated the stories into eight different collections, hovering around 15k-20k words each. And I'm publishing them exclusively in ebook format, for $0.99 each. When all eight are released, I'll do a massive collection of all of them, with the eight sections intact. At least, I think they'll be intact. Some of my stories were pretty slipstream, and could have fit in two or even three different collections (which, I admit, were pretty arbitrary in designation, but the reader has to be able to find what she wants to read, right?). So I guess we'll see on the sections bit. My short stories, all taken together, contain as many words as either one of my published novels, so there's plenty of good reading to go around, no matter how it ends up being categorized.

I got three and a half of the collections published before it was time to switch projects again. "Against a Sea of Troubles" (action fantasy), "Let the World Slip" (romance, usually fantasy), and "The Whirligig of Time" (sci fi, somehow all dark stories) made it to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords. "This Breathing World" (environmental fantasy/history) only managed to get posted to Smashwords before I had to stop, but it's one of my very favorites, both for cover and content, so I'm eagerly awaiting the completion of my current editing project (Elements of Allegiance) so I can pop that collection out to Amazon and B&N as well. They might get it out faster than Smashwords for once, since Smashwords is suffering a dearth of free ISBNs at the moment, and Apple, Sony and Borders won't take anything without an ISBN attached. (Edit: the ISBNs have kicked in, but Smashwords doesn't send things out to its affiliates until A: the work is approved and B: it's the day of the week for shipping out, so there's still time for me to beat, say, Sony or Apple)

What I have left is my dark and scary/horror humor collection, with the working title "The Jaws of Darkness", then two straight-up fantasy collections (I do write a lot of fantasy), and a separate collection that features children of fantasy (not children's stories, but stories about children). I might get to some of these this summer, but once we're back from the East Coast vacation we have planned in August, all bets are off, baby: it's NaNoPlaMo time!