Coming Soon: Where You Lived

One of the great things about the rise of online literary journals is the ease with which people can now actually read short fiction. It used to be that if you were published in a literary journal, you'd be lucky to get 200 eyes on your work, and none of those eyes would belong to anyone you actually knew, since unless your friends and neighbors made a point of crawling on their hands and knees along the bottom rack of their local Borders' magazine section in search of the literary journal section, well, they were unlikely to actually find a print copy of, you know, Esoteric Sounding Review. But in the last several years -- as the links on the left side of this page indicate -- it's become far easier for readers to find great online markets for short fiction or, at the very least, print journals have become much better about providing more online content. Who knows if people actually read that content...I'd like to believe they do. Either I believe that or I'll spend all of my waking hours making playlists on Spotify and not writing.

Which leads me to this next project I'm releasing. Not Spotify...the belief that people want to read more short stories. And, well, hopefully, my short stories. I've been lucky enough to publish two collections of stories with the excellent Other Voices Books and my hope is to continue to do so for ever and ever. Right now, however, I'm in the middle of writing a new novel (based, it should be noted, on a short story of mine, "Mitzvah", which was in Other Resort Cities) that will likely take me another 3 months to finish. Maybe longer. And so I'm probably a good few years from finishing another collection of short stories. (And, in fact, I haven't even written a new story in about nine months [the story "How Will The Pilgrims Survive?" is in the debut issue of The Rattling Wall], though I have to write one soon for an anthology...so...yeah, I better do that, I suppose.) So in the interim, I'm going to release a series of what I'm thinking of as suites of work, both fiction and nonfiction, since it's going to be a while before new work of mine is on the shelves. The first is a mini-collection of short stories called Where You Lived, which will contain three previously published, but uncollected, short stories, that will be released as an ebook in late September. This will be followed by a mini-collection of essays. And then a pop up book about my favorite meats and cheeses. And then a Choose Your Own Adventure. Okay. That's not true. (But, man, I'd love to write a Choose Your Own Adventure. Maybe I'll see if I can restart the Burn Notice series as a CYOA...if you're a spy, turn to page 20, if you're an arms dealer, turn to page 24...)

I don't know how many of these little projects I'll do, but I feel like it might be a fun way to get some new work out into the world while I'm working on larger projects and it's cool that with the rise of ebooks, there's an actual platform to do just this sort of one off.

 

 

Comments

[Brenna]

I'd kill for you to do a Choose Your Own Adventure book. I just introduced my son to those books. He went crazy trying to get to every possible ending. Those books are awesome!

Can't wait to see your new stuff!