So, What do We Do With A Short Story?

I got two anthologies from a library sale. They are both fifty to forty years old (like me,) so that gives an interesting range of short stories.

Short has never been my style. Like a great many writers, my works tend to be at least novella length. It's hard to cram all you need to know in order to get a story to work in under 5000 words. Even harder to do under 1000. A lot of mood must be condensed, which is a problem for a story that I have that is mostly agony, guilt and the numbness of loss meeting an emergency. It's 6000 words.

Where do you put something that short?

What do you do with it?

And realize, a storyline this short really can't be expanded to a novella, but it needs elbow room for mood.

The short stories I'm reading now are not necessarily under 5000 words. They sneak up to 10000, though The Big Bow Murder is actually more of a short novellete. This gives it the space to be funny and charming, in my personal opinion. It helps that Zwingli had a fun style of writing.

But he also had somewhere to put it. It was originally a serialized story that his editor at a newspaper asked him to write for, in his words, 'the silly season.' Wishing to give the sea serpent a break, he said. I guess the newspaper liked to write old sea yarns to pump up winter sales.

This gave him a couple of paragraphs to tell everyone in the florid style of the Victorian era about how people entertained themselves with this murder, and to float ever weirder solutions to his locked-door mystery. Definitely look up Isreal Zwingli's 'The Big Bow Mystery' sometime.

Regardless, I might put up some short stories to fill in my world here or on Medium. Gives me just enough elbow room.