I’m cataloging my short stories/flash fiction with the idea of producing some collections next year.
At present I’ve listed over 200 flash fictions of more than 500 words. Putting them in rough genres didn’t seem to help, so I’ve now allocated them among four themes, which became five:
- Time
- Change
- Animals
- Greed
and I added Christmas, but only ten stories fall into that group at present.
Recurring characters
I’m wondering how to handle all the Sir Woebegone and Carruthers (and friends).
Most of the Woebgones fit into the Time theme, as his sword helps him move in time and space. He certainly visits a lot of odd places. Most of the Carruthers fit in the Greed category. The question is whether I want to have them all collected together or not. Equally would that be too much of the same old thing for the reader?
A few stories could usefully be merged – the Erebor sequence, for example, which is about four stories. There is a serial involving luck which I wrote in one year that had three Friday the 13ths. The Boxcar sequence all fit into the theme of change. But should I group or merge them?
I’m not planning to put any of the stories that have been incorporated into the Princelings or Viridian System series in these collections, although I can think of one or two that might work in a Christmas set. One of those is not suitable for children, though! Then again, neither are some of the others.
Wordcounts
The majority are 1000 words, which means a lot of stories to get a decent-sized collection. I think 40 flash sized stories is too much for a collection. Maybe 25 is about the limit. That makes it novella size, really.
There are also several dozen 50 word and 100 word stories, which might just work as punctuation marks between longer ones. It’s an idea I might try out.
Stories on the blog
The other aspect is the availability of the stories on this blog. I may have to remove some of them, just so at least some of the content seems fresh. I think there are enough here to leave new readers an impression of my writing!
Cataloging is not as easy as it sounds.