Short Fiction - September 2018 and Going Forward

Short Fiction - September 2018 and Going Forward
On January 1, 2019, I restarted my short fiction reading project in earnest. As in previous years, I'm reading the minimum equivalent of one short story per day of the year. By minimum equivalent, I mean that it's OK to occasionally miss a day, as long as I make it up. And on many days I will read multiple stories, but I'm not allowed to count them as credits towards future calendar days -- they're just a bonus.

For those who know my obsessive detail-oriented personality, it won't surprise you to know I'm keeping extremely detailed statistics. You should see my spreadsheet, with eight separate tabs! There's really no need to keep these kinds of stats, but it makes me happy, so there you have it. I've also added something else to this year's goals: I plan to read every story published in 2019 by Daily Science Fiction, Every Day Fiction, and Nature's "Futures" section. But I don't want all of my reading to be flash fiction, so I'm trying to mix a lot of longer works in there too.

Shortly after the end of January I'll post my monthly round-up. I've read and cataloged 22 stories so far this month, which isn't bad considering it's only January 10th. (Hmm, I've also already hit my health insurance deductible for 2019, so not all quick starts are good starts....) In the meantime, I found my half-written blog post for reading I did back in September 2018, so I thought I'd go ahead and post that now. Several of the stories I read that month came from a 1939 collection of stories by E.M. Delafield, best known as the author of Diary of a Provincial Lady (1930). I find I'm lately drawn to these types of stories, which are about ordinary people's daily lives, loves, and heartaches during that specific time period.

However, the two stories I most enjoyed reading in September 2018 were:


"Copy Machine" by Shane Halbach (2014)

Length: 665 words
Genre-Subgenre (category): ??? (flash fiction)
Where Published: Flash Fiction Online
When Published: 2014-06
Link

I'm not at all sure how to characterize this little piece of flash. If you take it literally, then I guess it's science fiction, but I read it more as a wistful commentary on how difficult romantic relationships are to maintain indefinitely. What if we could clone ourselves -- the desirable aspects of ourselves -- as easily as using a photocopy machine? Wistful, yet a little playful.

It's also available as a podcast at Toasted Cake here



"Strings" by Charlie Hughes

Length: 3,163 words
Genre-Subgenre (category): Mainstream - dark (short story)
Where Published: Trigger Warning
When Published: 2018-05-02
Illustrated by: John Skewes
Link

Geoff is a forty-six year old who plays solo guitar gigs when he can get them. He's flattered when his much younger downstairs neighbors make a fuss over his playing, but is confused when things turn out quite differently than they initially appeared. I found this story sad, powerful, and extremely relevant to today's world.


Additional stories read in September 2018:

• "The Whale Wore White" by Anatoly Belilovsky
  
• "Robot" by Helena Bell (2012)
  
• "Breath" by Chelsea Berghoefer (2018)
  
• Stories in Love Has No Resurrection (1939) (collection) by E.M. Delafield:
  
  • "Love Has No Resurrection"
    
  • "Mothers Don't Know Everything"
    
  • "O.K. for Story
    
  • "It's All Too Difficult"
    
  • "The Young Are in Earnest"
    
  • "Bluff"
    
  • "The Girl Who Told the Truth"
    
  • "Victims"
    
  • "The Other Poor Chap"
    
  • "I Believe in Love"
    
  • "It All Came Right in the End"
    
  • "Soliloquy Before a Mirror"
    
  • "The Reason"
    
  • "The Indispensible Woman"
    
  • "Opportunity"
    
  • "My Son Had Nothing On His Mind"
    
  • "They Don't Wear Labels"
    
• "The Philistine" by E.M. Delafield (1926)
  
• "Yellowcat" by Claire Humphrey (orig. year unknown)
  
• "Universal Reality" by Michael Allen Lane (2018)
  
• "The Pink Agate" by Mary E. Lowd (2018)
  
• "The Vector of Our Love" by Elizabeth Shack (orig. year unknown)
  
• "My proposal for a book to be adapted into a movie starring Dwayne Johnson" by Robin Sloan (2018)
  
• "The Wrong Plane" by Robin Sloan (orig. year unknown)
  
• "Play Pretend" by Alex Sobel (2018)
  
• "Friday After the Game" by James Van Pelt (2000)
  
  

List of sources:

• 10Flash
  
• Analog
  
• Clarkesworld
  
• Curious Fictions
  
• Daily Science Fiction
  
• Flash Fiction Online
  
• Freeze Frame Fiction
  
• Grain Magazine
  
• Love Has No Resurrection (collection by E.M. Delafield)
  
• robinsloan.com