Discussion → Stories in Hiding
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I just added "Hooker" to this group. I took it out of Fictionaut hiding, were it has remained posted as "private." In fact, it has been published, in Thrice Fiction, so it doesn't really belong in this group. I am looking at my list of available (unpub'd) stories and not detecting a lot of flash on it. I guess most of my flash is separately pub'd.
I typed a list called "Stories from TWB [collection title] not separately published."
The subcategories of the list are: "Stories in defunct journals online," "Stories in very small journals offline," "Stories pub'd in non-journals online, such as edited blogs," "Stories not yet published as expected (forthcoming)," "Stories published only in part," "Stories published only in e-chapbooks," "Stories only at blogs including Fictionaut," "Other stories not included in TWB."
Ninety-one Fictionaut story postings to date, including stories, poems, essays, revisions, prose poems, flash fictions, cut-ups, collaborations, 20 viewable. My unpublished long collection of stories (PROSE, STORY) contains 99 entries in four groupings that are alphabetized within groupings that are chronological, so the first three groups fall under 1985-1999 (200 or so pp.), and the fourth grouping falls under 2000-2012 (200 or so pp.). Together, 435 pp., but since it is unlikely to find a publisher via contests where I have sent it, it may go through further revision in design.
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"Hooker" is not in this group, but I'll leave it available on my page and try to think of a very short (<500) to send to this group that has not been published separately and/or in an echapbook.
I am working without much feedback in the attempt to publish a volume of short stories of various types and genres (described above) that mixes or alternates lengths as well as types of prose narrative.
I have no plan to self-publish. If no publisher wants it, then it will not be a book. But the mixing of genres and lengths has excited me since '91 at least.
Lydia Davis visited our school in Houston. I asked her, boldly, at the Q & A (a long story about meeting a short storyist) how she managed to get Break It Down published, and she replied that she had been working (writing) for a long time before it happened, and she had been translating French literature and knew people.
My teacher, JR, discovered a week before Davis' arrival to campus that I didn't know who she was and hadn't read her book, but I had written that semester a story not terribly unlike her stories called "What Kiss" about the Gulf War as it played on the street in Houston, published in '93 in Gulf Coast.
I had missed discovering Davis in '88 when Break It Down came out because I was working all hours at a regional newspaper in upstate New York as wire editor.
I read her book the week of her visit to campus. It became a permanent favorite among story collections.
Group Description
ALL MICROFICTION ALL THE TIME.
Here's a place to post both published and unpublished Microfiction and a place to discuss and debate the special aesthetics of the genre.
Some sources claim word count under 100, others under 200, others under 400 and still others under 500. Your guess is as good as mine, but 500 is the absolute limit. The shorter the better. Poetry welcome.
Joseph Young in FRIGG, Spring 2009, wrote,
"To be its own genre, microfiction needs to do something that other forms won’t. It needs to use language, description, dialogue, character to tell a story that can’t be told any other way. It’s not just compression, and it’s not just leaving things out, background info on characters or such. Microfiction needs to carve out whole worlds in a space small enough to fit the eye. You look, just once, and there the whole story is, on the page...
"If fiction (e.g., narrative) is time, then microfiction is microtime. But let me caveat. A microfiction can describe the entire life of a character. It can illustrate birth, marriage, death, 80 years of experience. But the amount from that 80 years that actually occurs in microfiction, in microtime, is nearly nothing, a tenth of a second."
Me? I think of microfiction as the miniature galaxy inside the marble hung from the cat's collar in Men in Black.
To keep this group vibrant and alive, don't just post and run. Take the time to comment and especially engage in the discussion threads. It will make for a richer group experience.
--Gloria Garfunkel, Micro Cafe Barista
This is a public group.
Anyone can see it and join.