Last thing on Disposable Fiction.*

I write disposable fiction in that I, the author, only want twenty to thirty minutes of time from you, the reader. What would you do with that time? Watch a show on the telly, sit on a train, doze on the couch, maybe play a bit of a video game. It's disposable time. I want it. I want you to read in it. I promise you nothing but the short sharp shock of that time, and at the end, if you didn't like it, toss the story and, if you could find aspect you liked/loved, try a different piece of mine another time. If you like it, excellent. If it blooms in your mind and lingers and turns into something unique, that's more than I could ever have asked for, and it's nothing short of a pleasure from me to you. Afterwards, feel free to try another piece. Disposable time for disposable fiction and whatever you take from it, you take, good or bad, is yours to do with as you wish. Certainly I made no claim on what happens after. I just want you for the time it takes to read.

I do not write my fiction quickly or hastily or easily. I don't churn it out. I want it to engage with the world that I live in, and there are many different ways to do this, and I'm exploring them all. I want a connection as a reader and I want to begin it as a writer. Which means, basically, that writing means a lot to me. This is why I deal with the process of publication to get it out to you, the reader. It can take from weeks to months to years to sell a five thousand word piece and have it appear in front of a person. This might make what I've said appear faintly contradictory, because who in their right mind would spend this long and then tell everyone that they write Disposable Fiction... but what happens before it reaches you isn't important. But once it gets in front of you, I'm more than aware of the fact that you have thousands--if not millions--of other pieces of fiction you might want to read, or just have something different you'd like to do, and how do you know how that is going to go? In the end, you might not like my fiction. Alternatively, you might. You might even find that the story did nothing for you, one way or another, which is probably the most common of reading experiences.

I do not think calling short fiction disposable is a bad thing. Some people might. Some people will disagree with this totally, as is their right, naturally. No one person thinks identically to another and I'm certainly not speaking for anyone else.

But I write Disposable Fiction. Fuck whatever else is said: the stories are short and I pour myself into each piece because I love what I do; but all I want from you, the reader, is a bit of your time. Time you'd use on something you don't care much for. Time you'd kill. Give it to me and my Disposable Fiction. Give it to me and see what happens. Maybe it'll be like the song that gets stuck in your head. There's the religious comedy 'An Examination into the Chinese Made Roman Toga', the uncommon form of 'Johnny Cash (a tale in questionnaire results)', the science fiction revenge narrative of Dream of a Russian Princess, the dark fantasy road story about body snatchers in Cigarettes and Roses and the alternate history of 'The Dreaming City'. All I want is a bit of your time. Don't look back. Don't look forward. Just a little bit of now. There'll be something new later.

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* Which is now what I'm calling short fiction. It's meant with nothing but affection and love. It's catchy. I like it... and everyone else won't.

Yesterday's post about short fiction has gotten talked about over here. It's interesting that most people replying appear to have thought that I've made a judgment call about short fiction and said that I must read trash because I said I read and write short fiction for that burst of the moment and you move on afterwards.

The problem with that conversation, I guess, is that the word disposable appears to have been linked to the quality of short fiction, to suggest that a short story can't linger, can't alter the reader, can't have a point, can't whatever. Which is not what I said. It can do all those things. Why wouldn't it? But when I talk about the fact that fiction can be seen as disposable, I was talking about the time factor in reading it, and the fact that it is a small bit of fiction. After you've read it in a magazine or a website you can forget about it easily if you don't like it, even throw it away, not worry about it so much because it's small. The risk is less for your time. Whereas with a novel, you generally invest more time and you keep novels for the most part. Which is why archiving short fiction doesn't appeal to me much.

It's also worth pointing out again that I don't see the word disposable as a bad thing. I love the idea of disposable fiction. It's really quite freeing.

But whatever. It's fun to watch people react.

Tonight's topic: Short Fiction and what to do with it after it's published.

The topic comes round from Ben Payne (benpayne) who, after hearing that Agog! Smashing Stories had gone out of print, asked if I had ever "thought about archiving your old stories on a website?" The reason for that is that "someone told me this was a good idea... to pull in the fickle non-small-press-buying punters..." which seemed fair enough as a point and, before that, a question. A good one, even, because I started thinking about it later.

My immediate response to the question was no and, even now, that's still the answer. A little less emphatic, perhaps, but still the answer. It's probably fueled more through disinterest and my particular thoughts concerning short fiction than anything else. I'll get to that second bit in a moment, but first, the disinterest.

It's pretty simple, really, that one of the reasons I don't archive is because I don't have a website. I'm not a huge fan of websites when it comes to interacting with people. They're a bit too static, a bit too much like this dead thing floating upon the water. There are some very nice websites, of course, and Deb Biancotti (deborahb) does excellent web mojo. But for my personal tastes, I find that I just don't get any interest from websites. It goes to such an extent that I had to be convinced to put the 2005 Snapshot on the web and slapped round by David Carroll (ashamel) to focus on it. This disinterest is one of the things that convinced me to try blogging. Blogging is fluid, immediate, personal, direct. There's a sense that you're coming into contact with the individual, rather than viewing the billboard they have erected on the side of the information superhighway. Blogs are like the little diner on the side of the road: dirty, mean in make, and filled with a range of people you'd never seen connected in any other place.

So I've never had much urge to archive because I've never had much interest in sites. I suppose I could place this blog into a site, but then questions about designing, keeping, and operating one begins. The problem there is that I like shiny beautiful things, but lack the funds and ability to do it myself.

The other side of my response is linked to the way I view short fiction.

Much of the world now believes that prose--especially fictional prose--is a thing you keep. It's built to last. You keep it. Don't burn it, baby, keep it, keep it. Part of this, I think, is due to our educations, where we are taught the importance of prose. Words can change the world, can change us; they can speak to us, about us; they have a power that digs beneath the skin and lingers. It's all true, and don't think for a moment I don't love that about words. But it has, I think, made words precious, given them a sense of importance that poetry and fiction are trying to equal, and which a part of our society wants it to equal. Which is all fine and good and I certainly agree to the extent that I want good words, but good words is measured differently by everyone, so it all becomes murky there. The end result, however, has been to cast words as a thing to be kept, to be placed upon the shelf, to be given importance, and when new relationships walk in, pulled down and shown with a bit of emotion. It's kept. It's nurtured. It--and perhaps this last part comes mainly from writers, who have more than a right to think this way--should last.

(It strikes me, however, that this desire for prose to be long lasting is a bit of a contradiction in a society where most people do not re-read. It's just a thought that, since I'm as guilty as anyone else there. I don't re-read very often--instead, afterwards, I'm out searching for a new thing and there is so much new thing.)

In juxtaposition to this, my view of short fiction is that it is not built to last. It's a moment, a thought, twenty minutes, a bad sitcom of alloted time, a moment of quietness when you sit down, read it, engage on the level of the text as you wish, and then toss it aside. Don't bother re-reading it. Short fiction is about that short sharp stab of the moment. It's the now. It dates the moment you put it down. Grows old, tired. You go searching for something new and you forget it. You look for the author's next bit, which may be totally different to the one you just read because it's short fiction, and the time involved is tiny, nothing to stress, something you can give to any endevour and not feel as if you've lost anything if you hate it. Short story authors get a lot more second and third shots than novelists, especially if I liked an aspect of their story. But reading a novel is an investment of time and place (both head and real) and so the stakes, for the reader, are higher. They want more. They should get more. That's not a judgment over if one form has an inherent quality over the other, just noting that novels, with more pages, more room to develop, to change tone and form, are capable of doing more than a short story. Thus the experience of a novel should be larger than that of a short story, at least as far as I'm concerned.

So I write my short fiction to be consumed, to be eaten in a gulp and tossed aside, to be engaged at with it various ideas and characters and conversations with whatever I've though would be an interesting thing to work as a subtext (if I worked anything) but not, I believe, to be revisited unless it is altered in a substantial way. And this is how I write it: I throw myself in, scream for that wild burst of energy to write it (and the less wild ones of rewriting) and then I forget about it. If I reckon it was worth, I send it out, see how it goes, but essentially, I'm done with it.

Which means I don't think about archives.

The last thing I want to make clear is that I don't see this as a quality assessment. It has nothing to do with that. It's just looking at the time involved, both in crafting and reading. There is something about the short story to me that makes it a perfect bit of disposable prose. Others might not see it that way and that's cool, but me, I'm caught up in that and I love it.