Rights and Short Stories

Most writers of short stories will sell their stories several times over. I use the word sell slightly ironically. Very few writers or even publishers make a lot of money from short stories – unless they’re really well-known and put together a single author collection.

Going over to the dark side

Something Hidden

This is Bridge House’s latest anthology and came out just before Christmas last year.  It is a collection made up of entries to our 2011 short story competition. We asked for darker stories and we sure got them. Each one of them leaves you feeling slightly uncomfortable. This poses two questions. Why do we read? Do we always expect a good outcome?

Editing short stories electronically

I’m currently editing short stories for an anthology that comes out shortly before Christmas. There’s very little to do in what I would call the first structural edit. We had four times as many stories submitted as we needed so all of the ones we selected really work quite well anyway.

There were just one or two instances in the twelve I edited where something didn’t quite make sense – not because the story was ill-conceived but because there was a small problem with the language.

Nevertheless this time I’m going for three stages of editing – all conducted electronically. I thought it might be useful to describe this process here.