Short Thinking

by M. L. Buchman

I make a third of my living from short stories.

I'd like to pause right there and wind back the clock. Even a decade ago, this was so exceedingly rare as to be laughable. I had a friend who was a short story machine. He wrote three a week and he kept them in the mail until they sold--all of them. Some of those took three years and 20-30 submissions to sell. (Imagine the logistics of that: he produced ~150 stories per year and never let a rejection sit on his desk for more than a week (he had a weekly "mail everything" day), always launching it out to a new market. He got up to half a living with short fiction in an era when everyone agree that even that was impossible.

The present day, where we can sell directly to readers through Amazon, B&N, iBooks, Kobo, etc. has revolutionized that world.

However, let me clarify further, I make a third of my living with romance short stories. This actually is unheard of. I don't even have to wind back the clock. Present tense, there is one magazine for romance short stories: Heart's Kiss. 

So, imagine my surprise when my stories took off. Four years ago last winter, I'd sold a few to Fiction River Anthology Magazine and finally put one up for free on my website for a week just as a promo. And it started to sell. Sell! While it was free. When I took it off free, it really started to sell.

Total fluke, right?

So four years ago this month (I'm not the fastest learner), I tried another. Same thing. And another, and...

For four years now I have posted a free short story to my website on the 14th of every month, left it there for one week, and then watched it sell in wonder.

Now, there are some challenges here. If you don't read short stories, it will be much harder to write them. (Which was part of my excuse for years: "I only read novels so I only write novels.") However, when I finally thought to look at my bookshelf (which has been weeded through too many moves), I saw that many of the books I hung onto were short story collections. As a kid I inhaled short science fiction: Clarke, Asimov, Campbell, Hugo winners, Best of the Year, themed anthologies... I had spent the first decade or so of my reading life immersed in short fiction.

So, as a romance writer, I turned to find...an echoing desert. There were occasional anthologies of novellas, but not true short stories (5-12,000 words). Encouraged by my early success, I set out on a quest to learn to write short romance fiction.

A caveat: I'm a purist. Many people I've talked to about romantic short fiction say: "Getting a glimmer that they have a future together, that's enough." Or, "If I can get the meet cute to squeeze into a single story, that's a romance."

Nope! For me, a romance is only a romance when you get the full HEA. Probably the hopeful MGM musical romantic in me. It took a lot of practice to figure out how to get an HEA in a short story that also included the meet cute, but now it is one of my favorite forms.

Here's where it gets interesting! I started my short fiction in my military romance suspense series. I slowly learned how to move it over to my rapidly growing contemporary romance body of work. OR did I come to have a growing contemporary romance readership because I augmented it with short fiction? I strongly suspect the latter.

Now, finally, I'll take just the quickest peek ahead, which oddly enough is also a long look back. I love writing romantic suspense and contemporary romance and I don't ever see not writing them. But there's this love of science fiction that comes from all those years of wallowing in short stories. And I would love to build a science fiction readership to go along with my suspense and contemporary readership.

Therefore, I've started putting my foot back into SF as well. My fans have seen little blips of this in my few Future Night Stalkers stories. Now I'm going to do it in a regular way. Not free on my site, but instead collected with some of my favorite voices writing today in a quarterly anthology. Come on over, try it out. It's not all romance by any stretch (though I'll be shifting more and more SF rom in there as I learn how to write them), but it is some amazing reading!

JUST LAUNCHED: Boundary Shock Quarterly. #1, #2, #3

While you're at it, don't miss another of my romance short stories. Just subscribe to my newsletter to always get a reminder (and a free book too): http://free-book.mlbuchman.com/

M.L. Buchman started the first of over 50 novels and even more short stories while flying from South Korea to ride across the Australian Outback. All part of a solo around-the-world bicycle trip (a mid-life crisis on wheels) that ultimately launched his writing career.

Booklist has selected his military and firefighter series(es) as 3-time “Top 10 Romance of the Year.” NPR and Barnes & Noble have named other titles “Top 5 Romance of the Year.” In 2016 he was a finalist for RWA's RITA award.

He has flown and jumped out of airplanes, can single-hand a fifty-foot sailboat, and has designed and built two houses. In between writing, he also quilts. M.L. is constantly amazed at what can be done with a degree in geophysics. He also writes: contemporary romance, thrillers, and SF. More info at: www.mlbuchman.com.