200 Words on Short Stories

I love these. Short stories. Around the almost ten thousand word I feel like things are getting bloated. Genre stories lord over realistic stories.

I get enough realism daily. I like my life, and a lot of it is a lot of fun. But some parts of it are pretty sucky. The "pretty sucky" umbrella covers parts of everyone's life.

Which is why genre short stories are so great. Being short means they don't have to linger over pages of detailed world building. They can just sketch out the parts that they need. There's magic, or space aliens. These details don't have to make sense like a geometric proof does. They just have to feel right. Feeling right is better than "pretty sucky."

Also great about genre short stories is they can serve to gloss "pretty sucky," without making a show about it, because the suck is wearing a mask, like werewolves or spacesuits. The story of the people, or the things, who are, as Ford Prefect once pointed out, "are also people," is dancing in front of you, and only later do you realize that the suck is in there, and I feel like suck shared is suck diminished.