2015 WORD COUNT = 15480
words
Times are changing.
Technology is shrinking our world
and people have a lot more to do. Time is becoming a precious commodity.
Gone are the days when you could
find yourself sat down in the evening, bored out of your mind; nothing to watch
on any of the four TV channels, you didn’t own a Spectrum or a Commodore and it
was raining cats and dogs outside. Back then this could lead you to picking up
a good book and spending the next few hours just getting stuck into a whole new
world.
Nowadays we have video games,
50,000 TV channels (+TiVo), longer work hours and many more responsibilities.
It’s a lot harder to find any time you can justify on just sitting down and
reading that latest 500 page novel. I mean, it could be months before you get
to the end. And that’s if it’s a one off. What about getting through a trilogy
or a fourteen book saga. Since my son was born my wife has barely had time to
read any of the James Patterson books I constantly buy her.
So what other option is there?
When your time is short then it
makes sense that the fiction you read be short too.
First off, you can’t go wrong
with a good short story collection. You can dip in and out and will probably
finish a whole story during your lunch break. Instead of waiting for several
months before you get to the satisfying resolution, you can have it daily.
There are many short story
collections out there but I highly recommend any of the ones written by Stephen
King. Although regularly depicted as a horror writer, there is so much more to
his stories and no better show case than the following collections:
Of course, if short fiction is
still too much then there is always flash fiction. Stories so short you’ll be
done in about five or ten minutes. And if it’s really good flash fiction then
you’ll feel like you’ve just had an entire meal in one mouthful.
Obviously the sites I normally
promote are more about taking part in the writing (and for some of you that
might be the next step). But there are some out there that will give you that
quick fix, that story with an edge, a five minute tale that’ll stay with you
the rest of the day.
Let me divulge:
Paragraph Planet publishes
a 75 word story every day and has done since 2008. Stories don’t get much
shorter.
Angry
Hourglass publish their weekly winner each Wednesday in the Hump day
Quickie. These have a max word count of 360.
Daily Science Fiction publish a
sci-fi or fantasy story a day at no more than 1500 words.
Quaterreads are a little different to the
others in that you need to pay to read. But it is only $0.25 a
story and, if
you enjoy it enough, what better way to let the hard working author know?
Wattpad has a lot of authors posting
chapter by chapter releases of their novels, yet they also have a lot of great short
stories to browse through.
Of course you might not want to
begin a new world every time you find five spare minutes. What if you enjoy
characters so much that you want to see them again and again?
Episodic fiction is a growing
trend. It’s like watching your favourite TV show with new content updated on a
regular basis. I myself am currently working on a project called FRACTURED DAWN which has 1500 word
‘chapters’ being released every other Friday (I’m hoping to go weekly).
And I’m starting to look at other
projects and wondering if they might be better in this episodic formula. Sure,
there are still projects I’d like to see on a bookshelf one day as a fully-fledged
novel, but I have a lot of little ideas that will never see the light of day if
I wanted everything to end up that way. Perhaps, at this early stage in my
career, this format will work better and get more stuff out there for people to
enjoy.
An example of this episodic process
being done well is Betsy Streeter’s NEPTUNE ROAD
series. Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday Betsy posts brand new tiny episodes
of this fantastic ongoing series both on her website and on Wattpad (there’s also
a paperback collection available). It follows a great cast of characters trying
to get by on the planet Neptune. I’m currently up to episode 125 at the moment
but don’t let that number put you off. A couple of lunch breaks and you’ll be
all caught up.
So is bite size the future? I’m
starting to think it is, at least on a publishing front. A lot of people will
continue trying to read that epic novel come rain or shine. Others will give up
and ditch reading as non-essential in this hectic world of ours.
But right there in the middle is
a new breed of reader, one that wants to get in, be entertained, and get out
before the next thing flashes before their eyes. And if people want to read
that kind of thing then some of us are going to need to write that kind of thing.
Let me know of any other places
to go where short and flash is the prominent feature. And I highly recommend
visiting the sites listed above. There is some great material out there for you
to find.
See you in seven.
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