Welcome to the first ever Spherewide Short Story Symposium! I'm your host, Michael Williams.
Any story that's worth telling can be told in the short story format, and the purpose of the Symposium is to provide a forum for bloggers to strut their literary stuff. Most of us spend our time writing about Important Issues, and I thought it would be fun to change it up a bit and tease out our more creative natures.
Most of the links below will take you to the author's own blog, but I have hosted some of the stories locally by request. Some authors didn't want to receive commentary on their work, so I decided to let them each be responsible for providing whatever response functionality they desired. Please feel free to comment on the Symposium itself in the comments section for this post.
Many thanks to everyone who submitted a story, and to everyone who was kind enough to link to the Symposium during the submission process.
Without further ado, here are the entries, in the order they were received.
"The Great White Light", and "Home", by Chris Noble
"To A Good Home", by Brian J. Noggle
"The Love Charm" (alternate ending), by Eugene Volokh
"A Life Lived", by I Am Me
"Policy Decision", "The End of The Affair", "Contratemps", and "Impurities", by Francis W. Porretto
"Adrift at Sea", by Jason Kallini
"The Last Snow", by Lee Zanello
"A Cthulhu Conspiracy?", with several links to short stories submitted by Andrew Ian "Marty" Dodge
"Flight", by The Yeti
"Virtual Strangers", "Interview With The Vampire", "Impact", "Symbiosis 1", "Symbiosis 2", and "Through The Lens", by Todd Overman
"Sam and David", and "The Twitch", by Megan
"Unclaimed" (hopefully the permalink works), by Alifa Saadya
Untitled, by Bishop Vulture
"Purity", by Sarah N.
"Wild Night", by Adam Harris
"The Corpulent King", and "Midnight Movie", by Michael Williams
Thanks everyone, enjoy!
This is a wonderful idea and you have done us all a great service. I post short stories on my blog about once a fortnight. Since they all are Cthulhu based, I place them into the above piece as a link as well as seperate entry on the blog.
Thank you, oh gracious host. I will enjoy everyone else's stories in the next few days.
corpulEnt, michael.
Re: Corpulent, ah yes. I spelled it right in the story, at least; thanks.
Some excellent pieces here. Thank you.
Michael,
I just now discovered your site, and I can't find your email address.
I have a short story posted on my blog called The Argentine's Ice Box. I would have submitted it earlier had I known what you were up to.
Great idea! You are welcome to add mine to the list if you feel like going to the trouble.
For some reason, the link above didn't take. Here is the url to my story:
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/000050.html
I look forward to reading all of these stories. This was a great idea. I hope we can do more of this in the future . . .
JK
I would also like to see more of this in the future, it's a fantastic idea. I've only had time to read one or two of the entries so far, looking forward to the rest! Thanks for doing this, Michael.
I'm glad you all are enjoying it! We'll do it again, so tell your friends.
Yeah Michael this is great. I got a whole mess of the little buggers to be posted on my blog. The final edit of a novel is coming along well too. Might consider serialising it on my blog.
As the designated Hurler of Cold Water for the Internet, and one of the contributors to Michael's Symposium, I'd like to pass along a figure that I got from a very prestigious literary agent:
3,000,000 book-length fiction manuscripts are submitted to agents and publishers for English-language fiction each year.
That's just in case anyone was thinking of quitting his day job.
So: By all means, write. It's excellent exercise for the mind. It's a method of self-discovery. It propels the American economy with sales of computers and electricity. It keeps you off the streets, where you'd undoubtedly be chasing cheap women and smoking crack. It keeps you from posting comments to blogs such as this one about novels-in-progress that you might never finish. But for all but an extremely fortunate few, it will never, ever be a paying trade.
No, I'm not one of that fortunate few. I'm just trying to thin the herd a bit. (tee hee)
"Tony, my mother writes plays because nine years ago, a typewriter was delivered to this address by mistake." Alice, in Kaufman and Hart's You Can't Take It With You.
I'm not sure where you got that number from, but it seems absurdly high, even for the entire world. Nevertheless, how many fiction books are published every year? 100,000? Maybe more. The thing is, just getting published doesn't mean you can write for a living.
The number came from Donald Maass, perhaps the most successful fiction agent in America. Remember that one novel manuscript may be submitted -- in fact, almost certainly will be submitted -- to many agents and publishers, so that 3,000,000 submissions does not imply that 3,000,000 distinct novels are making the rounds. The number of distinct novel manuscripts being marketed could conceivably be as low as 100,000. My own guess is that it's around 250,000 at any moment.
According to Elizabeth Lyon in her book The Sell-Your-Novel Toolkit, approximately 7500 new novels are published each year. Most book-length publications are, of course, non-fiction.