You know that second between chewing a Cheez-It and swallowing it? Or the moment it takes to flush a toilet? What about those 10 idle seconds spent waiting for the light to turn green?
For the voracious reader, these moments are opportunities. All you need is a story of the proper length.
With that thought in mind, I’d like to introduce you to my latest book. It’s called Wee Stories: 1,001 One-Word Tales.
If you maximize your screen by about 200 percent, you might be able to read the text on this cover. This is an intentional artistic decision, one that reflects the minuscule size of the stories within. At one word each, they’re the shortest short stories you’ll ever read. They’re so short, in fact, that I call them microstories.
Novels take months to read. Short stories take hours. Even flash fiction stories take a few minutes. But microstories? They take mere seconds.
Consider this one. I call it Crossing at Dawn. Here it is, in its entirety.
Turtles.
It took me six months to write that piece. I tried to imagine what animal would be most likely to cross a road at dawn. A squirrel felt unremarkable, a chicken too cliche. Finally I settled upon the present form. I’m thrilled with the results.
There are 1,000 more microstories in the book but I’d rather not spoil them for you. Instead, I ask you to purchase Wee Stories when it goes on sale in June.
Until then, I encourage you to think about how many microstories you could’ve read in the time it took to read the blog post. By my count, it should be about 200 or so. Now that’s efficiency!
Kyle A. Massa is a speculative fiction author living somewhere in upstate New York with his wife and their two cats. His stories have appeared in numerous online magazines, including Allegory, Chantwood, and Dark Fire Fiction. His debut novel, Gerald Barkley Rocks, is available now.
