Flash fiction, short stories, novelettes and novellas.  I’m a big fan of all forms of short fiction, both reading and writing it.  I didn’t used to be so enthusiastic about it.

Once upon a time I was an avid reader of the epic doorstopper form of fantasy, with its multiple volumes of weighty tomes and series that didn’t end.  However, the more that they didn’t end, the more I began to drift away from them.  Waiting 20+ years for the conclusion of a story I started when much younger began to wear thin.  As did the padding that became more ad more pronounced as the series went on that filled out the books solely to keep the series going.

In addition I didn’t have as much time to devote myself to such weighty series.  And so I began reading other forms of fantasy – short fiction.  The epics went unfinished – there are only a few that I have completed.  I grew to enjoy the shorter form for its sharp action, succinct stories, lack of padding and general fun of action and adventure.

These mega-epics weren’t always the way – during the days of the pulp magazines short fantasy stories were all the rage. Authors like Robert E Howard (creator of Conan of Cimmeria, Krull the Conqueror and others), Fritz Leiber (creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser) and others wrote short stories, novelettes and novellas. C.S.Lewis’ Narnia series are actually what would be called novellas, and the grand-daddy of the epic novels – The Lord of the Rings – is only as long as single volumes of current day series.

The more I read of them, the more I wanted to write them as well.  I had always thought I’d write those sprawling epics when I was younger, but just as my reading tastes have changed, so have my writing.  I began to write short fiction and found it much easier and fun.  While I knew making a living from short fiction was harder than novels I had found my style and wasn’t going to let that stop me.

The style of writing long and short stories is vastly different – short stories are purer. That doesn’t make them better – just that they have to be distilled down compared to novels. Those 1000 page epic need a lot of padding, casts of thousands, pages of purple prose descriptions and dozens of plots to reach that length. Short stories only have the one, simple plot for the most, and don’t have the space for long, flowery description – they have to do more with less.

It is for such reasons that I currently prefer short stories, both reading and writing them.

Over a couple of years I’ve written a large number of works of short fiction, with a whole bunch more planned.  I look forward to sharing them and hope people have as much enjoyment reading them as I did writing them.