How did you become interested in short stories? By reading great ones; the first book of short stories I remember really impressing me was 'Dark Feasts' by Ramsey Campbell. I got it from a second-hand bookshop in Cleathorpes (small town on the Lincolnshire coast) when I was about fifteen and think I read about half of them in the back-seat on the ride home with my parents. 'The Companion', what a story! So when I started writing, that's what I wrote. I kind of had this naive idea that that was what writers did , even those who wrote roaringly successful novels. And in fact even now I struggle to think of any great author that didn't at least dabble in short stories. As an author, do you think writing short stories is worthwhile? Why? Short stories are pretty much all I write (I wrote a novel when I left university; it was a wannabe Martin Amis piece of rubbish). If you're asking are they "worthwhile" from an artistic point of view, then yes ab...
