The guitar page is up...

Sort of.

Kenny's Guitars

As I've said, I'm trying to focus my efforts on the novel, Wealth Effects. I also have a couple of short stories that I've kept on the back burner for so long they are just banging on the door of my head.

I have a love/hate relationship with short stories. On the surface, you might think they're easier than a longer form. But you'd be wrong. While there's no wasted sentences in a good novel, you have more room to maneuver. Really a novel is just a series of short stories linked together by common themes and characters, but a reader learns things about a character in one story that fuels their emotional response to situations in later stories.

And for all the work a short puts you through, it's only slighly more commercially viable than poetry. I know the publishing world is brutal, but the market for short stories is ridiculous. Hundreds of literary magazines with almost no budget or circulation to speak of with slush piles so deep they won't accept unsolicited submissions.

And the handful of paying customers, well, really. Playboy, thanks to Hef's ego, has continued to publish short fiction. When the bunny started out, Cosmopolitan ran short fiction. Eveyrone did.

Then television came along and just milked the skunk.

But if you want your story in Playboy you've got to keep in mind you're competing for that slot with Pulitzer winners and New York Times best-selling authors. Recent issues have included stories by Chuck Palahniuk, Amy Hempel and Annie Proulx. I can remember seeing Arthur C. Clarke, Kurt Vonnegut, Mario Puzo, etc., in there over the years. Yeah, they publish guys you haven't heard of, but if they've got a choice between me and Don DeLillo, I'd put my money on DeLillo every time. Especially since they know it's the girls people buy it for anyway, it really wouldn't matter if my story was 'better' than this hypothetical DeLillo.

I don't like that 'better' notion much anyway, because while there is some awful hot dog ingredients that get published, art is subjective. The point is, no matter how much I polish and hustle my short story, the best I'm likely to do is get published in a college-based lit mag with publication and a year's subscription by way of compensation.

I realize my novel will probably earn me less than that, but at least I'll have failed in a collossal way.

Plus, and anyone who knows me is going to blow soda out of their nose when they see me admit this (and I don't imagine anyone who doesn't know me would read my blog), I don't think in short story terms.

A story, for me, tends to feed on itself and grow. If I don't cut some sub-plots, 'Wealth Effects' is going to border on epic in scale.

Or not. That's part of what I have to figure out this week, whether I'm really going to try and trim it down to an average 300-page sort of thing or simply make sure there's no wasted sentences in it at 500 pages. Dunno for a fact, but I suspect that it's easier to get a shorter, tighter first novel published these days.

That could be my imagination too, though. I see a lot of fat books on the best-seller list. And on my shelf. 'Underworld,' 'Mason & Dixon, 'Kavalier & Clay, 'Middlesex,' these are all hefty tomes, as is 'A Confederacy of Dunces,' one of my favorite novels of all time...