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ladybusinessOne thing I’ve learned from talking to people about short fiction is that there are many different styles of reading short fiction. There are people like me who read one story (generally online) and then stop and do something else. There are people who sit down with a print or ebook magazine and read the whole thing cover to cover. There are people who only listen to short fiction in podcast form. So I was thinking about the different ways people read short SFF, and I wanted to find out more about these differences. I also thought that since lots of people have different short fiction reading habits, people who want to try short fiction might find that different pieces of advice are helpful to different people. So I’ve invited several guests to the column to talk about their short fiction reading habits and to share advice for people new to short fiction.
This roundtable features prolific short fiction readers, so they have a lot of great ideas for where to find short fiction, but I know it can be a little intimidating when there's so much to choose from and people who read so much! I hope this roundtable gives readers a taste of how many ways there are to read short fiction and how many entry points there are, and that there's no wrong way to read, including how much you read or at what point in life you start reading short fiction.
My guests are A.C. Wise, Bogi Takács, Brandon O’Brien, Vanessa Fogg, and Bridget McKinney. While we were working on this roundtable, the 2018 Hugo Awards finalist were announced, and I'm very pleased that two of my guests, Bogi Takács and Bridget McKinney, are on that list! Congratulations to both of them! And now without further ado I’ll let my guests introduce themselves.
A.C. Wise: I’m an author with two short fiction collections to my name, and a novella forthcoming. I’m also a reviewer with two regular monthly columns, Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read at The Book Smugglers, and Words for Thought at Apex Magazine. You can find me on my site and on twitter, where there’s a good chance on any given day I will be excitedly recommending even more short fiction.
Bogi Takács: I am a writer, editor and reviewer. I have edited Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016 for Lethe Press, and I’m just finishing up Transcendent 3. I blog about fiction and poetry on my site Bogi Reads the World, and my new column focusing on QUILTBAG+ classics of speculative fiction has just started on Tor.com. You can find me as bogiperson on Patreon and Twitter.
Brandon O’Brien: I’m a writer and performance poet from Trinidad and Tobago. I’m also the poetry editor for FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. I have a short fiction review column in Strange Horizons called The Jewelry Box, reviews for longer works for Cabbages & Kings called Black Star Cruises, and recently joined the Skiffy & Fanty team to talk about short fiction there as well. I’m![[twitter.com profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/e0caa790ec10/-/twitter.com/favicon.ico)
therisingtithes on Twitter, Facebook, and Patreon.
Vanessa Fogg: I’m a writer and reader in the American Midwest (Michigan, to be more precise). My short stories have appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, Mythic Delirium, The Future Fire, and other places. I review short fiction bimonthly at my blog, It’s a Jumble, as well as longer fiction. I also tweet frequently about whatever it is that I’m reading! You can find me on Twitter asFoggWriter and learn more about me at my website vanessafogg.com.
Bridget McKinney: I’m Bridget McKinney, blogger and editor at SF Bluestocking, where I’ve been writing about science fiction and fantasy since 2014, though I was floating around Tumblr for several years before that and writing dreadful fanfiction (and shamelessly derivative original fic) in spiral notebooks stretching all the way back to the early mid-90s. You can also find me on Twitter atSFBluestocking.
A.C. Wise: Short fiction reading is one of those things that has multiple starting points for me. I read fairy tales as a kid, then books of ghost stories—anything that looked like it might possibly be scary, I devoured it. Those ghost story compilations introduced me to several classics like The Lonesome Place by August Derleth and The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford, though I didn’t know they were classics at the time. In my early teens, I went through a phase where I read almost exclusively novels, then I came back to short fiction again through Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Fairy Tale anthologies. With the rise of online magazines, I started reading more short fiction, starting with Strange Horizons. As I got more interested in writing short fiction, I got more interested in reading it, and once I started reviewing regularly, I upped my short fiction reading even more.
Bogi Takács: I’m from Hungary and there it is much more common for people to read short stories than in the US.
I remember the first SFF short story I read was in Boys and Girls Yearbook 1977—I read it much later than 1977, but I collected these yearbooks used, with the help of my family. They mostly included nonfiction articles, with some short stories. This particular one was a Hungarian translation of Ray Bradbury’s The Rocket. I was six years old and I was completely blown away by this story.
My first SFF short story collection I read was György Moldova’s A beszélő disznó (The Talking Pig), a collection of political satire with science fictional elements. I picked up my mom’s copy because I thought it was a children’s book due to its cartoonish cover. I was in first grade and I was reprimanded for reading it under the table in Reading class! I didn’t understand many of the adult concepts, I remember I was especially perplexed by what "coffee grounds" were. I begged my mom for explanations for weeks, and in the end I felt I finally understood most of the book! (I probably didn’t.)
I am a second generation SFF fan, my parents—both agricultural engineers—were avid readers of Galaktika, the biggest science fiction magazine in Hungary at the time. So those stories were also among my early reads, and then I never really stopped!
Brandon O’Brien: As far back as I can remember, the only real 'short' stories I’ve read for most of my life, or at least before I started calling myself a writer, were probably fanfic. My original-fiction diet was more often whole novels or novellas, but when I sat down at my computer, often I’d just kind of stumble upon a piece of fanfic—often for TV shows or anime I didn’t even watch—and just eat it up.
That mostly changed really recently. My performance and writing work here in Trinidad, as a member of the poetry collective The 2 Cents Movement, also aligns me with the Bocas Lit Fest, the island’s big literary festival, and that exposed me to a lot of really talented writers and performers of all kinds. I studied a lot of short fiction from local writers I met there, and found that they were really good and really sharp and were writing the kind of language I liked, but I wanted more speculative things because that was what I wanted to write, and there wasn’t as much of that as I had hoped. That led to me really making the decision to become a science fiction and fantasy writer, and that meant I needed to read more, find more things to study. If it wasn’t for that, I not only wouldn’t have really started writing, but I also wouldn’t have discovered how robust the genre is, in particular when it comes to short fiction.
Vanessa Fogg: As a teen, I fell in love with the short stories of Bradbury and Asimov. I had a subscription to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and discovered so many great authors there, authors who would go on to become stars of the field. I let that subscription lapse when I went off to college, and for many years afterward I didn’t read short stories except in the form of the occasional print collection. Like most people I knew, I read novels. It was in 2010 or 2011 that I discovered short fiction in magazines once again. Somehow I stumbled online upon Fantasy Magazine before it was absorbed into Lightspeed. I hadn’t known that online SFF magazines even existed! A world opened up for me, and I haven’t stopped reading online SFF magazines since.
Bridget McKinney: Short fiction was an integral part of my early exposure to genre fiction, and I grew up reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine and Sword and Sorceress anthologies, Esther M. Friesner’s Chicks and Chainmail anthologies, and Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s collections of retold fairy tales. Though I didn’t have the language to articulate it at the time, I recognize in hindsight that, at eleven, I was hungry for stories by and about women, and those editors and publications (problematic as I now understand some of them to be) delivered in spades and formed the cornerstone of my adult tastes in SFF fiction.
As an adult, I’ve read short fiction more sporadically, only getting very serious about it in the last several years, but I don’t think one ever really gets over one’s first true love. My primary reason for reading short fiction now, however, is to discover new authors. Because of the ways short fiction is published, short fiction markets tend to be new open to what’s new, experimental or novel, and it’s thrilling to read new writers at the start of their careers and follow their evolutions over time.
For example how often do you read short fiction? What formats do you read? (e.g. online, paper, podcast?) Do you tend to read one story and then take a break or read a lot of stories in a row?
A.C. Wise: I generally read at least 1-2 short stories per day, some days more, some days less. I read both print and online, but I don’t tend to consume much via podcast. I usually try to take a small break in-between stories, particularly when I’m reading an anthology or a short story collection, even if it’s only five minutes. I like to give my brain time to absorb, refresh, and prepare for something new.
Bogi Takács: I usually read a bunch at a time. I keep recent online stories in tabs in my browser and then go through a clump of them. I also read a lot of short stories in print, mostly on Shabbat when I don’t use electricity! I’ve recently started editing an online reprints series for Galli Books—I’ve read so many stories in print anthologies that are never reprinted online, but which I want to show as many people as possible… So this is a good way to do that, and I’m very happy that Galli Books was interested.
Brandon O’Brien: I tend to swallow as much as possible, to carve out a day or two and just read. Online is how I find most of my short fiction, at least for now, so I’m either sitting at my phone or my laptop and reading through releases as they come out online, or sitting still and listening to podcasts. So my process is usually to read a story patiently and slowly, or listening carefully to a podcast, and taking a few moments to let it linger while I take notes on it, and then I move on to another. There’s just so much to read!
Vanessa Fogg: I try to read at least one story a day, but of course sometimes I get off track and go a few days (or more) without reading short fiction. Then I tend to binge and read a bunch at once. Most of the short fiction I read is online. Like others have said, I do usually take at least a few minutes between stories to absorb them. I like to write down my first impressions. I don’t generally listen to podcasts.
Bridget McKinney: I tend to be a terrible binge reader of short fiction. The list of publications I subscribe to has been growing a little every year—now including FIYAH, Uncanny, Fireside, Apex Magazine, and Clarkesworld—and if I’m honest I have to admit that it’s getting to be a somewhat unmanageable amount of reading, which leads me to procrastinate and then spend a weekend every month or two reading all the stories in basically one go over a weekend. Similarly, I tend to consume anthologies in marathon reading sessions, sometimes polishing one off in just a day or two.
A.C. Wise: There are several online publications I read regularly (Strange Horizons, Fireside, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, FIYAH, Lightspeed, Nightmare, The Dark, Anathema, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Syntax & Salt, I could go on…). I don’t always read full issues, but I always dip into each month/issue. I also read a lot of anthologies, and the occasional single-author collection. As for finding things outside my normal rotation of publications, I usually discover them by seeing recommendations drift across my Twitter stream. I also try to keep up with other short fiction reviewers. I do track what I read with a simple spreadsheet so I can refresh my memory when award nomination time rolls around.
Bogi Takács: I generally agree with A.C. here :) I also don’t frequently read whole issues unless I have them in print; then I generally read the whole thing cover to cover. My reviewing primarily focuses on work by marginalized authors, so that is how I pick stories from tables of contents, though I also read work by people who do not belong to any minority group at all. I’m trying to make sure I always read work by authors who are completely unfamiliar to me, because often it is the same very well-known authors from marginalized groups who get promoted—I really want to buckle that trend. And I always try to promote and repost short story reviews by other people too. I love the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag on Twitter and a few months ago, I made a thread of reviewers who belong to minority groups.
Brandon O’Brien: I have a small bookmarks folder of the online spaces I read the most, and just kind of lurk them often. Most of the time, though, Twitter is how a particular story gets my attention—when someone I’m following mentions that they have something new out, or the magazine is hyping their latest issue. Twitter is also good to draw my attention to marginalized writers’ work, because I’m really big on using my reviews as a platform for underrepresented stories. I like keeping track of those stories by hand, with pencil and paper.
Vanessa Fogg: It seems we all have similar reading habits! There are a number of online magazines that I keep my eye on (Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Anathema, Clarkesworld, Liminal Stories, and on and on), but like A.C. and Bogi, I don’t generally read whole issues straight through. As A.C. said, I tend to dip in and out of issues. There is so much to read, and as I find more and more great outlets (there are so many out there!!), it just gets harder to read it all.
These days, I do find a lot of new fiction through my Twitter feed. I take note of what new stories are getting a lot of attention by others. I follow recommendations by writers and readers I respect—such as all the other participants in this round-table! I also love following recommendations by Maria Haskins (who has a review column at the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog, as well as her own personal reviews column) and Charles Payseur, who blogs at both The Book Smugglers and Quick Sip Reviews.
Finally, if there is a writer I love and I know that they have a new short story out, I’ll try read it no matter where or how it appears. Most writers I know announce their new publications on social media. The trouble is: I follow so many great writers, and I keep discovering new ones to follow! Of course, this is rather wonderful trouble to have.
I keep track of what I read in a simple Word document.
Bridget McKinney: These days, most of the short fiction I read is in magazines that I subscribe to, which I tend to read cover-to-cover, so I keep track of them pretty much the same way I keep track of any other books I read: with Goodreads and a handwritten list in a notebook. I’m also extremely likely to click on links to short fiction from Twitter, and there are a few authors who I actively follow to make sure I don’t miss anything they publish.
A.C. Wise: Picking up on my answer to the last question, reviews are a great way to find short stories, particularly once you get a sense for a reviewer’s taste and whether it matches your own. A few reviewers whose recommendations I regularly enjoy are Maria Haskins (Barnes and Noble Sci Fi Blog), Charles Payseur (The Book Smugglers and Quick Sip Reviews), and the Short and Sweet column right here at Lady Business. There’s so much excellent short fiction out there these days that it can be overwhelming. But you don’t have to read everything. It’s okay to pick and choose or give up on a story that isn’t working for you. Find an author you like and follow their work, or a publication you enjoy, or keep an eye on what other people are reading and recommending. The flipside of there being so much short fiction out there, and much of it being available for free online, is there’s bound to be something for everyone!
Bogi Takács: I would think about my favorite topics, and then ask people for specific recommendations and look for recommendations lists! Many reviewers are very approachable on Twitter or social media in general. A lot of them also have Ko-fi accounts where you can give them a small tip for their work.
Brandon O’Brien: Short fiction can be a daunting space to try to find work, but the beauty of having so many online spaces is that they put work out so often that you can literally just pass through Strange Horizons or Daily Science Fiction once a week and find a new thing to read. Also, Bogi is right—a lot of reviewers are more than happy to throw out recommendations if you ask. Charles Payseur, in fact, infrequently has Twitter threads where he gives two or three recommendations based on just three keywords, just to give you a taste of all the different ways writers are approaching some of the same ideas and images in the genre. Also, do what I often do: some of my favourite writers will plug the things they’re reading, which is a good way to find a writer you may not have heard before. It’s often a good sign when the writers that make you happy have writers that make them happy.
forestofglory: I want to chime in here and say that I love making themed lists, and I take requests. Also I think reviewers and recommenders are really great resources for exploring short fiction—I wrote about the importance of recommendations in this very column. I listed some of my favorite short fiction recommenders, including some the participants of this roundtable.
Vanessa Fogg: I concur with what everyone has said above. If you find a short-story writer you really like, follow them on social media so you’ll know when they have a new story out. Follow reviewers that you like (such as everyone here and all that A.C. recommends above). Browse through some publications to find ones that match your taste, and then keep reading them. Every publication has a distinctive voice. If you like hard sci-fi, Clarkesworld tends to publish a lot of that, although they do publish fantasy as well. Shimmer is known for strange, lyrical fantasy. Lightspeed publishes a good mix of fantasy and sci-fi, in a range of tones. If you’re new to reading short SFF fiction, I’d suggest regularly following one or two such publications for a while. It will open you up to a range of authors, and from there you can branch out even more.
Bridget McKinney: Read broadly, as broadly as possible, really, to start out with, but don’t keep reading stuff that you don’t like. Pay attention to who the editors are of publications you consistently enjoy, and follow the work of editors whose tastes overlap with your own. If you use social media, be sure to follow the editors and writers of stories you love best; I discover new-to-me writers and stories all the time from things shared by other editors and writers. Similarly, if you like reading reviews, find a reviewer whose tastes intersect with your own and take their recs. Mostly, though, don’t waste time reading things you don’t enjoy, no matter who recommends it.
A.C. Wise: Just one? Ack! Okay, I’ll go with the most recent story I read and enjoyed as of this writing, which is "The War of Light and Shadow, In Five Dishes" by Siobhan Carroll at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It does a lovely job of world building through descriptions of the preparation and consumption of various dishes, with tons of gorgeous sensory detail. Warning, it will make you hungry.
Bogi Takács: One of my recent reading surprises was also a food-themed story! "Cooking with Closed Mouths" by Kerry Truong in Glittership (ed. Keffy R.M. Kehrli) offered a delightful combination of found family, folklore, migration and cooking. There is also a free podcast version of it!
Brandon O’Brien: Something really touching that I read recently would definitely be Nalo Hopkinson’s "Old Habits", reprinted in the latest issue of Uncanny Magazine. I didn’t know before that I was a sucker for a story about ghosts coming to terms with their ghostliness and clinging to life in any way they can until I read this one.
Vanessa Fogg: Ugh, just one? Okay, one short story I recently read which has stayed with me is "Cosmic Spring" by Ken Liu in Lightspeed. During the universe’s “winter” (or season of decline, of maximizing entropy), one last sentience travels through space, harvesting the energy of dying stars. It’s a gorgeous piece about home and memory, about hope and death and cycles of renewal. Like much of my favorite science fiction, it evokes a sense of vast time and distance and wonder. . . but Liu beautifully injects a real sense of human poignancy as well.
Bridget McKinney: I just finished reading The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Daniel Mallory Ortberg, and it contains several stories that I loved, but my favorite was "The Six Boy-Coffins," which is a retelling of a couple of Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 451 stories. It’s clever and a bit wryly funny and very sharp, and it has some interesting things to say about gender and about silence and about choosing and consent.
forestofglory: Thank you so much everyone! One of the things I wanted to highlight is that there are many paths to short SFF and many different ways of reading and enjoying short SFF. Some people have read short fiction as long as they’ve been reading while others started more recently or took breaks. There’s also many styles of reading short fiction, as talked about earlier. There’s no wrong way to read short fiction (and it's okay to decide that short fiction is not for you).
If you are a new to short fiction, try not to be overwhelmed by how much is out there. All of my guests read a lot short fiction – that’s why I asked them to take part in this roundtable. However you can also read and enjoy less short fiction than my guests and still get a lot out of it. I don’t want to make people feel ashamed or overwhelmed. For example, a couple people mentioned reading a story a day, but if you wanted to have time based goal but read less you could try reading a story a week, or a story a month. Remember reading isn’t supposed to be a chore.
If you are looking to read more short fiction, I hope you find some of this advice helpful. Obviously, different bits of advice will work better for different people depending on one’s reading style, social media use, and what have you. I’m always ready to welcome more people into the short SFF reading community.
If you enjoy learning about how other people consume media then I hope you found this fun and informative. It's fun to compare and contrast reading habits. I’d love to hear more about my readers' personal short fiction reading habits in the comments section!
This roundtable features prolific short fiction readers, so they have a lot of great ideas for where to find short fiction, but I know it can be a little intimidating when there's so much to choose from and people who read so much! I hope this roundtable gives readers a taste of how many ways there are to read short fiction and how many entry points there are, and that there's no wrong way to read, including how much you read or at what point in life you start reading short fiction.
My guests are A.C. Wise, Bogi Takács, Brandon O’Brien, Vanessa Fogg, and Bridget McKinney. While we were working on this roundtable, the 2018 Hugo Awards finalist were announced, and I'm very pleased that two of my guests, Bogi Takács and Bridget McKinney, are on that list! Congratulations to both of them! And now without further ado I’ll let my guests introduce themselves.
Please introduce yourself.
A.C. Wise: I’m an author with two short fiction collections to my name, and a novella forthcoming. I’m also a reviewer with two regular monthly columns, Women to Read and Non-Binary Authors to Read at The Book Smugglers, and Words for Thought at Apex Magazine. You can find me on my site and on twitter, where there’s a good chance on any given day I will be excitedly recommending even more short fiction.
Bogi Takács: I am a writer, editor and reviewer. I have edited Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction 2016 for Lethe Press, and I’m just finishing up Transcendent 3. I blog about fiction and poetry on my site Bogi Reads the World, and my new column focusing on QUILTBAG+ classics of speculative fiction has just started on Tor.com. You can find me as bogiperson on Patreon and Twitter.
Brandon O’Brien: I’m a writer and performance poet from Trinidad and Tobago. I’m also the poetry editor for FIYAH: A Magazine of Black Speculative Fiction. I have a short fiction review column in Strange Horizons called The Jewelry Box, reviews for longer works for Cabbages & Kings called Black Star Cruises, and recently joined the Skiffy & Fanty team to talk about short fiction there as well. I’m
Vanessa Fogg: I’m a writer and reader in the American Midwest (Michigan, to be more precise). My short stories have appeared in GigaNotoSaurus, Mythic Delirium, The Future Fire, and other places. I review short fiction bimonthly at my blog, It’s a Jumble, as well as longer fiction. I also tweet frequently about whatever it is that I’m reading! You can find me on Twitter as
Bridget McKinney: I’m Bridget McKinney, blogger and editor at SF Bluestocking, where I’ve been writing about science fiction and fantasy since 2014, though I was floating around Tumblr for several years before that and writing dreadful fanfiction (and shamelessly derivative original fic) in spiral notebooks stretching all the way back to the early mid-90s. You can also find me on Twitter at
Tell us a little bit about how you started reading short fiction regularly?
A.C. Wise: Short fiction reading is one of those things that has multiple starting points for me. I read fairy tales as a kid, then books of ghost stories—anything that looked like it might possibly be scary, I devoured it. Those ghost story compilations introduced me to several classics like The Lonesome Place by August Derleth and The Upper Berth by F. Marion Crawford, though I didn’t know they were classics at the time. In my early teens, I went through a phase where I read almost exclusively novels, then I came back to short fiction again through Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s Fairy Tale anthologies. With the rise of online magazines, I started reading more short fiction, starting with Strange Horizons. As I got more interested in writing short fiction, I got more interested in reading it, and once I started reviewing regularly, I upped my short fiction reading even more.
Bogi Takács: I’m from Hungary and there it is much more common for people to read short stories than in the US.
I remember the first SFF short story I read was in Boys and Girls Yearbook 1977—I read it much later than 1977, but I collected these yearbooks used, with the help of my family. They mostly included nonfiction articles, with some short stories. This particular one was a Hungarian translation of Ray Bradbury’s The Rocket. I was six years old and I was completely blown away by this story.My first SFF short story collection I read was György Moldova’s A beszélő disznó (The Talking Pig), a collection of political satire with science fictional elements. I picked up my mom’s copy because I thought it was a children’s book due to its cartoonish cover. I was in first grade and I was reprimanded for reading it under the table in Reading class! I didn’t understand many of the adult concepts, I remember I was especially perplexed by what "coffee grounds" were. I begged my mom for explanations for weeks, and in the end I felt I finally understood most of the book! (I probably didn’t.)
I am a second generation SFF fan, my parents—both agricultural engineers—were avid readers of Galaktika, the biggest science fiction magazine in Hungary at the time. So those stories were also among my early reads, and then I never really stopped!
Brandon O’Brien: As far back as I can remember, the only real 'short' stories I’ve read for most of my life, or at least before I started calling myself a writer, were probably fanfic. My original-fiction diet was more often whole novels or novellas, but when I sat down at my computer, often I’d just kind of stumble upon a piece of fanfic—often for TV shows or anime I didn’t even watch—and just eat it up.
That mostly changed really recently. My performance and writing work here in Trinidad, as a member of the poetry collective The 2 Cents Movement, also aligns me with the Bocas Lit Fest, the island’s big literary festival, and that exposed me to a lot of really talented writers and performers of all kinds. I studied a lot of short fiction from local writers I met there, and found that they were really good and really sharp and were writing the kind of language I liked, but I wanted more speculative things because that was what I wanted to write, and there wasn’t as much of that as I had hoped. That led to me really making the decision to become a science fiction and fantasy writer, and that meant I needed to read more, find more things to study. If it wasn’t for that, I not only wouldn’t have really started writing, but I also wouldn’t have discovered how robust the genre is, in particular when it comes to short fiction.
Vanessa Fogg: As a teen, I fell in love with the short stories of Bradbury and Asimov. I had a subscription to Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine, and discovered so many great authors there, authors who would go on to become stars of the field. I let that subscription lapse when I went off to college, and for many years afterward I didn’t read short stories except in the form of the occasional print collection. Like most people I knew, I read novels. It was in 2010 or 2011 that I discovered short fiction in magazines once again. Somehow I stumbled online upon Fantasy Magazine before it was absorbed into Lightspeed. I hadn’t known that online SFF magazines even existed! A world opened up for me, and I haven’t stopped reading online SFF magazines since.
Bridget McKinney: Short fiction was an integral part of my early exposure to genre fiction, and I grew up reading Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine and Sword and Sorceress anthologies, Esther M. Friesner’s Chicks and Chainmail anthologies, and Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling’s collections of retold fairy tales. Though I didn’t have the language to articulate it at the time, I recognize in hindsight that, at eleven, I was hungry for stories by and about women, and those editors and publications (problematic as I now understand some of them to be) delivered in spades and formed the cornerstone of my adult tastes in SFF fiction.
As an adult, I’ve read short fiction more sporadically, only getting very serious about it in the last several years, but I don’t think one ever really gets over one’s first true love. My primary reason for reading short fiction now, however, is to discover new authors. Because of the ways short fiction is published, short fiction markets tend to be new open to what’s new, experimental or novel, and it’s thrilling to read new writers at the start of their careers and follow their evolutions over time.
Can you describe your short fiction reading habits?
For example how often do you read short fiction? What formats do you read? (e.g. online, paper, podcast?) Do you tend to read one story and then take a break or read a lot of stories in a row?
A.C. Wise: I generally read at least 1-2 short stories per day, some days more, some days less. I read both print and online, but I don’t tend to consume much via podcast. I usually try to take a small break in-between stories, particularly when I’m reading an anthology or a short story collection, even if it’s only five minutes. I like to give my brain time to absorb, refresh, and prepare for something new.
Bogi Takács: I usually read a bunch at a time. I keep recent online stories in tabs in my browser and then go through a clump of them. I also read a lot of short stories in print, mostly on Shabbat when I don’t use electricity! I’ve recently started editing an online reprints series for Galli Books—I’ve read so many stories in print anthologies that are never reprinted online, but which I want to show as many people as possible… So this is a good way to do that, and I’m very happy that Galli Books was interested.
Brandon O’Brien: I tend to swallow as much as possible, to carve out a day or two and just read. Online is how I find most of my short fiction, at least for now, so I’m either sitting at my phone or my laptop and reading through releases as they come out online, or sitting still and listening to podcasts. So my process is usually to read a story patiently and slowly, or listening carefully to a podcast, and taking a few moments to let it linger while I take notes on it, and then I move on to another. There’s just so much to read!
Vanessa Fogg: I try to read at least one story a day, but of course sometimes I get off track and go a few days (or more) without reading short fiction. Then I tend to binge and read a bunch at once. Most of the short fiction I read is online. Like others have said, I do usually take at least a few minutes between stories to absorb them. I like to write down my first impressions. I don’t generally listen to podcasts.
Bridget McKinney: I tend to be a terrible binge reader of short fiction. The list of publications I subscribe to has been growing a little every year—now including FIYAH, Uncanny, Fireside, Apex Magazine, and Clarkesworld—and if I’m honest I have to admit that it’s getting to be a somewhat unmanageable amount of reading, which leads me to procrastinate and then spend a weekend every month or two reading all the stories in basically one go over a weekend. Similarly, I tend to consume anthologies in marathon reading sessions, sometimes polishing one off in just a day or two.
How do you find short fiction to read? Do you keep track of what you read?
A.C. Wise: There are several online publications I read regularly (Strange Horizons, Fireside, Shimmer, Clarkesworld, FIYAH, Lightspeed, Nightmare, The Dark, Anathema, Flash Fiction Online, Apex, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Syntax & Salt, I could go on…). I don’t always read full issues, but I always dip into each month/issue. I also read a lot of anthologies, and the occasional single-author collection. As for finding things outside my normal rotation of publications, I usually discover them by seeing recommendations drift across my Twitter stream. I also try to keep up with other short fiction reviewers. I do track what I read with a simple spreadsheet so I can refresh my memory when award nomination time rolls around.
Bogi Takács: I generally agree with A.C. here :) I also don’t frequently read whole issues unless I have them in print; then I generally read the whole thing cover to cover. My reviewing primarily focuses on work by marginalized authors, so that is how I pick stories from tables of contents, though I also read work by people who do not belong to any minority group at all. I’m trying to make sure I always read work by authors who are completely unfamiliar to me, because often it is the same very well-known authors from marginalized groups who get promoted—I really want to buckle that trend. And I always try to promote and repost short story reviews by other people too. I love the #DiverseBookBloggers hashtag on Twitter and a few months ago, I made a thread of reviewers who belong to minority groups.
Brandon O’Brien: I have a small bookmarks folder of the online spaces I read the most, and just kind of lurk them often. Most of the time, though, Twitter is how a particular story gets my attention—when someone I’m following mentions that they have something new out, or the magazine is hyping their latest issue. Twitter is also good to draw my attention to marginalized writers’ work, because I’m really big on using my reviews as a platform for underrepresented stories. I like keeping track of those stories by hand, with pencil and paper.
Vanessa Fogg: It seems we all have similar reading habits! There are a number of online magazines that I keep my eye on (Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Dark, Anathema, Clarkesworld, Liminal Stories, and on and on), but like A.C. and Bogi, I don’t generally read whole issues straight through. As A.C. said, I tend to dip in and out of issues. There is so much to read, and as I find more and more great outlets (there are so many out there!!), it just gets harder to read it all.
These days, I do find a lot of new fiction through my Twitter feed. I take note of what new stories are getting a lot of attention by others. I follow recommendations by writers and readers I respect—such as all the other participants in this round-table! I also love following recommendations by Maria Haskins (who has a review column at the Barnes and Noble Sci-Fi and Fantasy blog, as well as her own personal reviews column) and Charles Payseur, who blogs at both The Book Smugglers and Quick Sip Reviews.
Finally, if there is a writer I love and I know that they have a new short story out, I’ll try read it no matter where or how it appears. Most writers I know announce their new publications on social media. The trouble is: I follow so many great writers, and I keep discovering new ones to follow! Of course, this is rather wonderful trouble to have.
I keep track of what I read in a simple Word document.
Bridget McKinney: These days, most of the short fiction I read is in magazines that I subscribe to, which I tend to read cover-to-cover, so I keep track of them pretty much the same way I keep track of any other books I read: with Goodreads and a handwritten list in a notebook. I’m also extremely likely to click on links to short fiction from Twitter, and there are a few authors who I actively follow to make sure I don’t miss anything they publish.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to read more short fiction but isn’t sure how to find works they will enjoy or how to incorporate short fiction reading into their life?
A.C. Wise: Picking up on my answer to the last question, reviews are a great way to find short stories, particularly once you get a sense for a reviewer’s taste and whether it matches your own. A few reviewers whose recommendations I regularly enjoy are Maria Haskins (Barnes and Noble Sci Fi Blog), Charles Payseur (The Book Smugglers and Quick Sip Reviews), and the Short and Sweet column right here at Lady Business. There’s so much excellent short fiction out there these days that it can be overwhelming. But you don’t have to read everything. It’s okay to pick and choose or give up on a story that isn’t working for you. Find an author you like and follow their work, or a publication you enjoy, or keep an eye on what other people are reading and recommending. The flipside of there being so much short fiction out there, and much of it being available for free online, is there’s bound to be something for everyone!
Bogi Takács: I would think about my favorite topics, and then ask people for specific recommendations and look for recommendations lists! Many reviewers are very approachable on Twitter or social media in general. A lot of them also have Ko-fi accounts where you can give them a small tip for their work.
Brandon O’Brien: Short fiction can be a daunting space to try to find work, but the beauty of having so many online spaces is that they put work out so often that you can literally just pass through Strange Horizons or Daily Science Fiction once a week and find a new thing to read. Also, Bogi is right—a lot of reviewers are more than happy to throw out recommendations if you ask. Charles Payseur, in fact, infrequently has Twitter threads where he gives two or three recommendations based on just three keywords, just to give you a taste of all the different ways writers are approaching some of the same ideas and images in the genre. Also, do what I often do: some of my favourite writers will plug the things they’re reading, which is a good way to find a writer you may not have heard before. It’s often a good sign when the writers that make you happy have writers that make them happy.
forestofglory: I want to chime in here and say that I love making themed lists, and I take requests. Also I think reviewers and recommenders are really great resources for exploring short fiction—I wrote about the importance of recommendations in this very column. I listed some of my favorite short fiction recommenders, including some the participants of this roundtable. Vanessa Fogg: I concur with what everyone has said above. If you find a short-story writer you really like, follow them on social media so you’ll know when they have a new story out. Follow reviewers that you like (such as everyone here and all that A.C. recommends above). Browse through some publications to find ones that match your taste, and then keep reading them. Every publication has a distinctive voice. If you like hard sci-fi, Clarkesworld tends to publish a lot of that, although they do publish fantasy as well. Shimmer is known for strange, lyrical fantasy. Lightspeed publishes a good mix of fantasy and sci-fi, in a range of tones. If you’re new to reading short SFF fiction, I’d suggest regularly following one or two such publications for a while. It will open you up to a range of authors, and from there you can branch out even more.
Bridget McKinney: Read broadly, as broadly as possible, really, to start out with, but don’t keep reading stuff that you don’t like. Pay attention to who the editors are of publications you consistently enjoy, and follow the work of editors whose tastes overlap with your own. If you use social media, be sure to follow the editors and writers of stories you love best; I discover new-to-me writers and stories all the time from things shared by other editors and writers. Similarly, if you like reading reviews, find a reviewer whose tastes intersect with your own and take their recs. Mostly, though, don’t waste time reading things you don’t enjoy, no matter who recommends it.
Would you recommend a short story that you’ve read and enjoyed recently?
A.C. Wise: Just one? Ack! Okay, I’ll go with the most recent story I read and enjoyed as of this writing, which is "The War of Light and Shadow, In Five Dishes" by Siobhan Carroll at Beneath Ceaseless Skies. It does a lovely job of world building through descriptions of the preparation and consumption of various dishes, with tons of gorgeous sensory detail. Warning, it will make you hungry.
Bogi Takács: One of my recent reading surprises was also a food-themed story! "Cooking with Closed Mouths" by Kerry Truong in Glittership (ed. Keffy R.M. Kehrli) offered a delightful combination of found family, folklore, migration and cooking. There is also a free podcast version of it!
Brandon O’Brien: Something really touching that I read recently would definitely be Nalo Hopkinson’s "Old Habits", reprinted in the latest issue of Uncanny Magazine. I didn’t know before that I was a sucker for a story about ghosts coming to terms with their ghostliness and clinging to life in any way they can until I read this one.
Vanessa Fogg: Ugh, just one? Okay, one short story I recently read which has stayed with me is "Cosmic Spring" by Ken Liu in Lightspeed. During the universe’s “winter” (or season of decline, of maximizing entropy), one last sentience travels through space, harvesting the energy of dying stars. It’s a gorgeous piece about home and memory, about hope and death and cycles of renewal. Like much of my favorite science fiction, it evokes a sense of vast time and distance and wonder. . . but Liu beautifully injects a real sense of human poignancy as well.
Bridget McKinney: I just finished reading The Merry Spinster: Tales of Everyday Horror by Daniel Mallory Ortberg, and it contains several stories that I loved, but my favorite was "The Six Boy-Coffins," which is a retelling of a couple of Aarne-Thompson-Uther Type 451 stories. It’s clever and a bit wryly funny and very sharp, and it has some interesting things to say about gender and about silence and about choosing and consent.
forestofglory: Thank you so much everyone! One of the things I wanted to highlight is that there are many paths to short SFF and many different ways of reading and enjoying short SFF. Some people have read short fiction as long as they’ve been reading while others started more recently or took breaks. There’s also many styles of reading short fiction, as talked about earlier. There’s no wrong way to read short fiction (and it's okay to decide that short fiction is not for you).If you are a new to short fiction, try not to be overwhelmed by how much is out there. All of my guests read a lot short fiction – that’s why I asked them to take part in this roundtable. However you can also read and enjoy less short fiction than my guests and still get a lot out of it. I don’t want to make people feel ashamed or overwhelmed. For example, a couple people mentioned reading a story a day, but if you wanted to have time based goal but read less you could try reading a story a week, or a story a month. Remember reading isn’t supposed to be a chore.
If you are looking to read more short fiction, I hope you find some of this advice helpful. Obviously, different bits of advice will work better for different people depending on one’s reading style, social media use, and what have you. I’m always ready to welcome more people into the short SFF reading community.
If you enjoy learning about how other people consume media then I hope you found this fun and informative. It's fun to compare and contrast reading habits. I’d love to hear more about my readers' personal short fiction reading habits in the comments section!
