Guest article on Vulpes Libris for Short Story Week

The book-loving folk at the excellent book blog Vulpes Libris invited me to contribute a guest article for their Short Story Week. My article, What We Talk About When We Talk About Short Stories, is now up. Thank you to Vulpes Libris for inviting me to rant about short stories, my favourite topic!

To give you a taster:

I would like to tell you what I will not be talking about. I won’t be:

1. Talking about the short story collection as the victim of the narrow-minded publishing industry, how sad it all is, if only they could all wise up etc…etc..
2. Trying to persuade the readers of this blog to abandon all novels and move wholeheartedly and exclusively to short story collections because they are far superior
3. Saying things like, “Well, in this day and age, with the diminishing attention spans and tiny screens on mobile devices, shouldn’t short stories just be a perfect fit?”

None of the above, I feel, does anything to inspire readers. Who wants to read the “poor short story” that no-one thinks is really as good as a novel? Do short story writers want to be read out of pity? I don’t think so.

The rest of the post here.