I need an opinion, dear readers. In my upcoming short story collection, The Calvin Sky, I want to include an Author’s Note. I’ve written the following draft and just wanted to get some input.
I used to specialize in short stories without endings. All throughout high school and college, I’d get dozens of ideas, tiny morsels of inspiration, usually just a sentence or two long, which I’d pursue only as long as the initial bout of inspiration lasted. Sometimes, I’d manage to get ten or twenty pages of a story that never really went anywhere before I abandoned it, and sometimes I’d get a single sentence that could have led to something of value but was likewise forsaken. I used to toy with the idea of someday releasing these short stories and abandoned pieces of fiction in a collection called Never-Ending Stories.
This is not that collection.
The stories that follow— some might be called short stories, others flash fiction—are products of the same impulse to write down an idea without knowing where it’s going to go. The difference is that, thankfully, I’ve gotten past that inconclusive specialization and I now have the ability (I think) to plan out a story or at least see it through until the end. It’s infinitely less frustrating for me, and, I’m sure, infinitely less frustrating to my would-be readers to have a complete story.
Some of these stories might someday be expanded into longer stories or even novels (as might be the case with The Mood Garden and The Ministry of Lost Hours), one is an excerpt from a novel (Bright and Blue- Chapter 1) and some, as short and silly as they may be, feel satisfyingly finished (Return to Sender). But for now, what I want them to be is an introduction to my work, a peek at my writing voice and the kind of stories that I write.
Enjoy.
So, thoughts? Is it lacking something, is it totally unnecessary? Would you like to hear me talk more about the stories, or just let them speak for themselves?
