Short Reads

Fiction, Nonfiction, & Experimental Stuff

Photo by Johnny Briggs on Unsplash

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 o…