Current number of subscribers: 390…in Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, India, Iraq, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the U.S.A
Here’s my short-short story subscription offer. For five dollars U.S. (eight Canadian), I’ll e-mail you a year’s worth of short-short stories. The stories will be between 200 and 2,500 words long (with possible rare exceptions). Based on my prior output, I would expect most of the tales to be either 500 or 1500 words. That is, many of my previous stories seem to have been two to six typed pages.
As to genre, I’ll be creating my usual eclectic mix of SF, fairy tale, mystery, and literary stories.
The stories will come to you as unformatted e-mail text, which will make it easy for you to read them on a wide variety of devices. The stories are sent with the expectation that you will not forward them to other readers, unless it’s with my permission as part of a subscription offer.
I started sending stories out in January 2002. Subscribers receive three stories a month.
What is a short short story? A sudden fiction? A flash fiction? Definitions are sometimes made by arbitrarily choosing a story length. For example, a flash fiction is a story of fewer than 750 words. But my favorite definition of the short-short is from Kate Wilhelm’s introduction to my collection of short-shorts, Flaming Arrows. Among the ways that we can know the house of fiction: The reader can be invited in to tour the rooms and search the closets. That’s a novel. Or the reader may be invited to stand outside at a window and look into one particular room. That’s a short story. Or the reader may have to kneel at a keyhole and peer in to see just enough to know what’s going on in a part of that room. That’s the short-short story, the most compressed of narratives and the one that demands the most of readers.
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