Short Reads
Fiction, Nonfiction, & Experimental Stuff
Welcome to Short Reads, a section where you’ll find my new (or newly rewritten) short fiction and nonfiction—experimental work in bits and pieces that are difficult to publish elsewhere but easy and fun (for me!) to share with you here on Substack. The stories are light and on the cozy side, celebrating what’s good in the lives of the characters you’ve met in the China Bayles and the Darling Dahlias mysteries. The nonfiction (I’m still thinking about this) is still swirling around in my head—more about that as it becomes clearer to me.
The publication of serial fiction has a rich and storied history. We could start with Chaucer’s fourteenth century Canterbury Tales, linked stories by different narrators, all sharing a journey. But it was nearly four centuries later, after printing technology developed and literacy rates soared, that periodicals began publishing fiction in serial format. Here are a few important writers and their well-known works—many of which I’m sure you’ve read:
Samuel Richardson, Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
Charles Dickens, The Pickwick Papers (1836-1837)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859-1860)
Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873-1877)
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1856)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902)
Zane Grey, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912)
Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (1929-1930)
Georgette Heyer, One Woman Who Knew (1933)
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 (1950-1953)
Isaac Asimov, Foundation (1942-1950)
Agatha Christie, The Mystery of the Spanish Chest (1960)
Stephen King, The Green Mile (1996)
Currently in the works from me here at Substack: short stories in serial episodes that you can read in your inbox or your browser. These are emailed on Wednesdays, free to all subscribers. For supporting subscribers, some stories may include additional premium content (recipes, craft ideas, gardening how-to, curated links, etc.).
Thanks for being a reader!