Short Stories Are Perfect For....

  1. Long trips to the bathroom
  2. Doctor appointments where they are only running "5 minutes" behind
  3. Obscenely long lines at the grocery store because the person in front is trying to win the exact change award
  4. Pretending to look like you're important and busy because you're staring at your phone
  5. Extended family get-togethers and you're not too keen on talking to any of your relatives
  6. Improving your vocabulary during a boring class - at least you're learning something, right?
  7. Waiting for your fashionably late friend to show up for your dinner engagement
  8. Actually putting your iPad to good use
  9. Lunch breaks where you don't want to look like a loser by just sitting there alone and chewing
  10. When you're not focused enough to read a novel but don't want to tell people that you just sat around and watched TV the whole weekend
  11. When you can't decide if you're in the mood for a rip-your-heart-out horror story or a rip-your-heart-out sappy romance
  12. Appearing artsy at trendy coffee shops

Comments

  1. AnonymousNovember 18, 2011 at 10:42 AM

    I'm with you - I love short stories! Compelling little tales that let me experience another world and walk beside interesting characters while I eat yet another ham-and-swiss sandwich for lunch. Here's to the short stories!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Alain GomezNovember 18, 2011 at 11:19 AM

    I find that they're especially useful when I'm apparently suffering from attention deficit. #11 is frequently an issue for me lol.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Elisabeth Grace FoleyNovember 19, 2011 at 5:19 PM

    I like reading short stories when I'm writing something myself - when I feel like reading, but don't want to get too distracted from my own story by getting deep into a novel.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

One Hundred Eyes

There is a "Netflix Original" tv series called Marco Polo.  I'm a sucker for historical shows, especially if they feature martial arts.  Since this show had both I couldn't resist! As a short story writer, I really love this day and age we live in with TV series.  I love  how so many of them now tell sprawling tales with complex character development serial style.  This style of storytelling is something that short story readers have known about since forever but only now does it seem to really be hitting the mainstream media. Marco Polo took that serial style one step further by creating a spin off short film (about 30 minutes long) that told the backstory of one of the reoccurring side characters, One Hundred Eyes.  In the series, One Hundred Eyes is the kick butt martial arts master.  What makes him even more hard core is that he's blind.  Nothing is cooler than a blind kung fu master who can hear the enemy coming from a mile awhile.  The short spin off fil
Read more

Review of "Ferryman" by Nigel Edwards

Summary: "A mythology grew up around the Ferrymen, fostered by a mystique which they wrapped around themselves. Some thought them amoral servants of a ruling elite, sanctioned to undertake work beyond legitimate resolution; others with more fanciful imaginations – or who were more devout, depending on your point of view – believed them emissaries of Evil, with a capital E." Could the Ferrymen become real in your lifetime? Should they? Read this thoughtful and disturbing near-future science fiction story and decide for yourself. Review: This was a fantastic short story.  "Well-written" doesn't even begin to describe Ferryman ; it's engrossing.  The simple, clean style perfectly highlights our precise  protagonist.  If this future Edwards presents to us does in fact become a reality, the character he describes is exactly the type of person who would become a Ferryman: highly competent with the hint of a god complex. What's  especially clever abou
Read more

Interview with Author Hugh Howey

Welcome to Book Brouhaha! Why don't you start out by introducing yourself and telling us a little about "Wool." Thanks for having me, Alain! I suppose I'm just this normal guy who just wrote a little story called Wool. It's about a group of people who live underground. When their society turns on itself, it threatens all of mankind. In a way, it poses the conundrum of every revolution: How do you destroy an unjust social structure without the collateral damage being worse than the injustices were? I suppose the most interesting thing about me, personally, is that I lived on a sailboat while I was in college. This led to a career as a yacht captain, which sent me all over the Caribbean and the East Coast. I didn't start writing in earnest until my wife dragged me away from the sea and into the mountains. I've always loved the short form. I've been told that it isn't as marketable, even though science fiction has a long and glorious history of c
Read more