I’m getting my short story “Fractional Ownership” ready for publication. I started to call it my “most recent” short story, but it is actually the first short I wrote when I began writing short stories a few years ago. I’ve been a little reluctant to publish it, not because puppies are killed or anyone’s arm gets sawed off, but because I don’t admire the main character who wants to go to Mars. At all. He’s not an attractive fellow, so it’s good the story is super short.
Back when my boys were in high school I used to day dream about teaching a science fiction class at their school. (No, no one asked me to. This daydream was purely internal.) I mentally divided science fiction into two general categories: idea stories and heroism stories. I would have assigned Robert Heinlein’s “All you Zombies” as an example of an idea story. You get transgender time travel with attitude, all conveyed in a short story. I would have assigned Taylor Anderson’s Destroyermen as an example of a novel that fell in the heroism. category Don’t get me wrong, Anderson’s novel is full of ideas–an alternate universe where the asteroid didn’t hit and dinosaurs have evolved to self-aware intelligence, a secret island race of adorable lemur people, and all the work necessary for a group of Word War II destroyers to survive. Plus, it’s got the heroism: it’s full of good people facing horrible obstacles and doing their best to overcome them.
I’m realizing that my novels fall into the heroism category. I don’t think my short stories do. If I’m going to spend that much time with a main character or two, they’ve at least got to be trying, whatever their flaws, to do the right thing. I’m more willing to dabble in the dark in shorter stories, and let the people be a little more flawed, and the results a little more ambiguous.
This means that my plan to use my short stories to market my novels is a bad one. If you like the weird stuff in the short stories, you might not like the novels. And vice versa. You have been warned.
After a sales pitch like that, I’m sure you’re dying to rush out for “Fractional Ownership.” Not yet. I’m still working on the cover.
However, “Rapunzel” is now out of Kindle Unlimited and available on other retail platforms. And it’s free at Barnes and Noble, Kobo, and Apple’s iBooks. Amazon hasn’t dropped the price yet, but that might happen in the next week or two. Rapunzel should be entering library distribution along with the other short stories, too. Contrary to all I’ve said above, I do like the characters in Rapunzel. But it’s an idea story.
First contact.
First sacrifice.
First answers.
FAA attorney Terrence Rogers dreams of space, but he spends his days on informed consent for space tourists. Young foreign service officer Hal Cooper faces real change with the arrival of an alien spaceship, but it means something else for Terrence.
A short story.
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