Authorship

I’ve been toying with this idea for a while but I’m finally going to make it happen. I’ll be periodically publishing some of my previously unpublished short stories here on my little corner of the internet. Just the good ones, I hope.

It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and I’m very excited. But the big hold up has always been that once published anywhere, most magazine editors will refuse to "reprint" your work. So that story is pretty much "dead" as far as direct career advancement. The Polyphony periodic anthology, for example, even goes so far as to state in their guidelines that if your story is available anywhere (even with a password protecting it, even if only one person sees it) then they’ll "reject it unread" — because I guess it’s tainted.

Well, that’s their choice. There’s a certain allure to elitism, I’ll admit. But my choice is to depart that whole self-reinforcing hill of beans. There’s no doubt what some editors would say to that — "if you can’t get your work professionally published, that means it must not be good enough." There’s still a huge stigma to self-publishing anything. And to that, I’d say "you, the reader, can decide for yourselves." I’ve already had my work professionally published. Professional cachet is not the point of the exercise.

I write because I love it, not for money or fame. And I might as well share some of it before I die (not that I’m going anywhere soon).

In fact, I’m publishing these stories under a creative common’s license, which means you can republish them for free, at will, as long as attribution remains intact. If you want to make a movie out of any of them, go ahead, same deal. And if I happen to get some attention in the future, then I’m perfectly willing and able to write new unpublished stories for the pro markets. But attention is not my goal. I believe in the idea of "give it away and see what comes back." Consider it an experiment with no expected outcome.

So please enjoy the stories posted here (and linked at right under "short stories"). If you like them, drop me a line. I’ll post with comments enabled at first, but I’m not looking for critiques. If you want to say you loved the story, or tell me it sucked, feel free. But I do have writer friends for the fine detailed critiques.

Avi