August has been a bit of a mess for reading

My reading this past month has been very fragmented, and I blame Catherynne M. Valente.

In an early-August posting (or “toot,” as they are known) on Mastodon, she mentioned that voting for this year’s Hugo awards was coming up soon, and that buying a voting-only membership in Worldcon would allow me to download most of the nominated stories (including her own novelette, When He Calls Your Name).

I bought my packet a week before votes were due, which meant I had almost no time to read anything. I raced through of the screenplays for short-form dramas (I’d seen most of them), then determined I had time to read all the short story and novelette nominees. I finished just in time to get my votes in. Yes, I voted for Catherynne’s story, which was almost magical and reinterpreted one of Dolly Parton’s most famous songs.

I’ve ignored short science fiction shamelessly over the decades, preferring novels that I can sink my teeth into and last a long time. But I’m finding my tastes changing. I’m currently reading Kitty Cat Kill Sat, a novel I’m enjoying but finding hard to read steadily because it’s so damn long (474 pages in paper), and I'm not sure where it's going, even a third of the way in. I want to keep plugging away at it, but it's getting to be more of a chore.

Add to that I’m taking a class on writing flash fiction at the Write On The Sound writer’s conference in October. I’m actually finishing a short story (about 1,300 words) to enter in the conference’s writing contest. And I was gifted a copy of Pamelyn Casto’s Flash Fiction: Alive In the Flicker: A Portable Workshop.

The world seems to be trying to tell me something.

After reading the shorter Hugo nominees (Valente’s story had better win, that’s all I can say), I bought three online magazines: two that most of the Hugo nominees had some from, and one of flash fiction. I’m thinking about subscribing.

Are the winds pushing me in a new direction? Younger readers, at least, seem to prefer shorter works, or at least stuff that can be easily absorbed in shorter bursts, inexpensively, on small devices like phones. It’s not that “kids aren’t reading,” it’s more that kids might not be reading as many novels. Perhaps the winds of fiction are indeed changing. I know I want to get more into reading new science fiction, and it looks like short works might be the way to do it. Do I want to write it as well?

I’m not sure yet what it means for me. My contest short story comes from one of several novel plots I’ve dreamed up over the past year, and working on it (a lot of it guided by workshopping with a few trusted readers) has been extremely satisfying. My biggest hurdle with even thinking about writing short fiction has been coming up with ideas, and the lack of space to deeply develop characters, something that’s been really important to me in the past. So we’ll have to see what happens over the next few months.

In the meantime, I’m giving in to another thing I’ve spent some time kinda-sorta resisting: re-reads. Apple TV is releasing a series based on William Gibson’s 1984 cyberpunk classic Neuromancer in January, and science fiction discussion boards have been coming alive with people re-reading the book or reading it for the first time in preparation. Gibson is by far my favorite SF author, and its been a few years since I read through his books, so I’ve started Neuromancer again and intend to read through his entire oeuvre between now and the end of the year. Yes, I’ll be reviewing them all as well.

Finally, Apple TV is releasing season six of their Slow Horses series in September, based this time around on two (instead of just one) of Mick Herron’s comic espionage books, Joe Country and Slough House, so I need to speed up my re-read of those books as well (or just re-read those two…don’t want to sprain my eye-muscles, after all).

I’d better not go blind anytime soon.