Karina — As an actor who trained for stage work, I’m pretty clear on the differences between theatre and film (grin). Being good at one doesn’t make one good at the other. And knowing how to “look sad” or scream loud doesn’t make one a real actor….

I get so tired of performance writing I could scream loud myself sometimes.

If readers (and sometimes even authors) knew how to approach the short story, we’d be onto something. I’ll have to use an analogy from elsewhere because I grew up reading short stories, so I can’t say I ever expected them to be anything other than themselves. Here it goes…

Stories are as related to novels as theater is to film. They may seem like they are interchangeable, and a lot of people will try to do just that. I once dated an actress and watched play after play with her. I was working in film then, so you can imagine how much we argued about the differences and similarities of these media, their merits and shortcomings.

Like those short stories that read like mini-novels, most of the plays we attended felt like ultra-low budget movies. Most of them bet their souls on pyrotechnics to keep the audience from jumping ship. I was often cocky and annoying enough to say, “Show me something theater can do that film can’t.” Well, I got my wish. The moment happened during Virtual Solitaire by Dawson Nichols. It was a monologue about, of all things, a virtual reality tester. My jaw dropped and I wanted to jump up and down with excitement. I couldn’t imagine any film achieving what Dawson (yes, the author was also the sole actor) could on that stage. It didn’t matter if the movie got a $200-million budget, it couldn’t get any better than Dawson’s performance. What a revelation.

That’s what I look for in short stories, the moments that can’t be obtained elsewhere. I just can’t get enough. I even physically sleep on short stories now that my bookshelves have ran out of space and I must keep stacking them under the bed.

Tania, by making readers aware of the options and giving them pointers on how to approach the chimeras of short fiction, you are basically taking that skeptic theater-trashing audience from play to play until they find their very own Virtual Solitaire.

I read Sarah’s “Sex With Ghosts” a couple of weeks ago (I keep an eye on Strange Horizons) and remember enjoying her humor quite a bit. I even had to stop every so many lines and just stare at the screen with a big smile and thinking, “She keeps doing that, wow.” Which is, she kept constructing those great moments with just a few words. I loved her narrator.

I’m going to translate Tania Hershman’s review into Spanish and include it in the promo-kit when there is one. I haven’t read her article on the short story yet, but will do so shortly.

Kelley, I can only imagine how hard it must have been in the past to get stories like yours published. Stories that don’t lend themselves to be categorized strictly this or clearly that. I’m taking a Science Fiction and Fantasy class right now and many people aren’t comfortable with stories that fall outside their expected sub-sub-genres (not even outside the main sub-genre!). Terry Brooks came up a lot as an evil doer for starting to include technology in his fantasy series. Does it really matter that much? I had no clue that readers could be so boxed in on their expectations. I want literature to help me step out of the box (even if it’s a fantastical box), not remain safely confined within. And that’s what you do with issues light years far more transcendent than flashlights vs. torches.