A question of content

[msagara]

I went out for dinner with ksumnersmith last night and during the course of conversation, most of which involved a lot of structure neep (because I really, really, really enjoy writing process discussions, to the point of complete over-focus which would bore almost any other writer out of their mind), she mentioned that there is nothing of my written work available on-line. This has come up, for her, because when she talks about my work with other people, she has nothing to point them at.

This would be because I am a dinosaur.

She strongly suggested that I put up at least a few .pdfs of my shorter work someplace where readers could actually get to it, to get some idea of what my writing is like. But my short fiction isn't really like my novel-length fiction. I think. I'm possibly not the best judge of this.

Because MeishaMerlin closed its doors, the collection that would have been published by them is not going to be published by them. I haven't actually tried to sell the collection anywhere else; I sort of didn't try to sell the collection to MM, either (Steve asked).

So.

I'm asking for suggestions of possible short story downloads, because it seems reasonable to put a few of them up on the not-very-much-used website. It's also been suggested elsewhere that I put up a chapter or two of previous novels.

Comments

[estara.livejournal.com]

One tip I can give there, if you ever get around to visiting London: go to Forbidden Planet on Tottenham Court Road. Their basement is full of 28 shelves of scifi and fantasy, British and US - you can browse for hours.

At least it used to be like that in 1997, when I last visited on my until then yearly London pilgrimages from Germany to buy US Comics and British scifi/fantasy.

The shop is still there, and they have a very good website, too.
http://www.forbiddenplanet.co.uk/
It's the shop that Neil Gaiman worked in, I believe. I wouldn't be surprised if I had seen him at the time, but he wasn't famous then, of course, so the only memory of staff I have is the amazement when I walked out with 500 British Pound worth of books (yes, I did travel with an empty suitcase).

[stephanieburgis.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I would love to go there! I've been to the Forbidden Planet in Bristol, which is great - the nicest SF/fantasy bookstore I've been to in the UK - but I've heard the London branch is much, much bigger and more comprehensive. (I live in Yorkshire, and unfortunately, all the Forbidden Planets here focus only on comic books/TV tie-in action figures/etc., with no novels in stock...so I'm pretty limited to amazon.co.uk for the moment!)

[estara.livejournal.com]

^^ you ought to go to London at least once during your stay in the UK. When I was an au-pair in Bournemouth and later when I was a foreign language assistant in Cambridge, I took the yellow bus (around two hours travel) to drive in for the day and go back in the evening - it was fairly affordable.

Sometimes I even went to a matinee in the West End. That was easier when I did the three day trips from Germany though, those had hotels in London.

On the other hand: on the Forbidden Planet website the London one isn't mentioned at all, so maybe they closed it.

As I said, I haven't been there in 10 years, heh.