Things have been quiet from Luc Reid here of late, but his Brain Hacks for Writers column will be ramping back up again in the coming year. Luc’s been busy, y’see… and here’s one of the things that has contributed to that busyness:
Bam! 172 Hellaciously Quick Stories throws normal people into strange circumstances in stories that can each be read in a few minutes. Cinderella tries to get a grip after her divorce; inventions go horribly wrong; robots rise up against their human masters; a thinking teddy bear is trapped for decades in a toybox; love blossoms in a hotel corridor unmoored from time and space; dinosaurs invent the steam engine; girlfriends blink in and out of existence; and Very Bad Things happen that might be worth it in the end. Writers of the Future winner Luc Reid’s stories bridge science fiction, fantasy, humor, and the unclassifiable.
Bam! ($2.99) is available for the Kindle on Amazon at http://amzn.to/grEHH4 and for all eReaders on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/35395 . A printed edition is planned for release in February.
If you’ve been wondering what to put on that ebook reader you got for Christmas, wonder no more…
I think what I’m hearing recently is the collective resounding death knell of the long-form story. Of the last three clumps of flattened tree bark I looked at at the Barnes and Noble, only one of them was in anything resembling a “novel”. The other two consisted of pages doused in ninety-font IMPACT text consisting of 140 characters or less, liberally interspersed with pictures. It’s like the “adult” books are devolving into kid-lit “See Spot Run” picture books. And these are not just cringe-fringe wingnuts or celebutard starpower vehicles. One was by Dennis Leary and the other was by a legitmate thinker whose name eludes me (I blame the short term memoryless net-brain). You can practically see the devolution happening before your very eyes. Suddenly the man-child neologism is much less metaphorical and funny. Ashes to ashes.
I do hate to say it, but I think that Wintermute has a point. Flash and short stories seem to be the norm of late, Novellas for anything from $.99 to $2.99 are much more common to be found in e-format than novels. Personally I do think this sucks, Unless I can find seven to ten novellas that have the same storyline, it’s not worth investing the emotional time into the characters, at least not for me. Flash is alright, but mainly as brain-candy. It’s fast, easy to digest, and naturally has less subtle impacts than a longer piece is able to work with.
Cheers.
Dan.