We try our best to keep an eye on the careers of the authors we publish at Futurismic; thankfully it’s usually made easy by them swiftly moving on to selling stories to bigger and better markets, getting a book contract, or accruing award nominations… or sometimes all three!

One such author is Ruth Nestvold, who is a Nebula Award nominee this year for her story “Mars: A Traveller’s Guide”. As such, the Nebula Awards site has an new interview with her, of which the following is a snippet:

Between the short story and the novel, which form do you prefer and why?

I enjoy both, and at the moment I miss writing short stories, I have to admit. It’s nice to have the whole overview in my head, to complete something in a short space of time. With an epic novel like Yseult or my current project, Shadow of Stone, I can’t keep all the elements in my head at once, and I have to keep jumping backward and forward to figure what I’ve done and what I have planned. But the advantage of a novel is that you can immerse yourself in the world, both as reader and as writer. Short stories are better at delivering a punch, a quick, strong impression. I also find them better for experimenting, again both as reader and writer. The database entries I use to tell “Mars: A Traveler’s Guide” would get pretty old if they were used for a whole novel.

To get a feel for Ruth Nestvold’s short story style, go revisit her two Futurismic solo contributions – “The Other Side of Silence” and “Exit Without Saving” – and the story she co-authored with Jay Lake, “The Rivers of Eden“.