If I may blow the punchline short stories aren’t long enough. Not long enough to develop a character, not long enough to have a fully resolved conflict, not long enough to fully unveil a world. They’re fun, and I’ve read some good ones, but for this writer, they just don’t have enough calories. Or I can’t get them to have enough calories.

Short stories remind me of when I used to play speed chess. I was never any good at it and admired those who could do it well. I admired players who could in the span of two to five minutes play a full chess game, featuring sound openings, clever combinations, gutsy sacrifices and a precisely executed end game. But even when I watched such games, they never satisfied. They felt like incomplete, truncated and mechanical exercises. Chess, you see, needs hours not minutes to arrive at a masterpiece. That’s why the Chess World Championship isn’t played in a couple of hours of speed chess. Think a month.

That’s how writing short stories feels for me. I always lose because I can’t think that fast. I can’t write that short. I can’t find enough runway for the story to take off, and if I do manage to get it off the ground, I don’t find enough space to fly, and when I go land the thing, there it is again, that short runway.

That doesn’t mean that for me it’s a novel or nothing. Lately I’ve been experimenting with more episodic writing, and shorter works, such as Active Shooter and the upcoming Tracking Jane series. But even these don’t find their full breadth (and breath, as in breathing room!) until about the twenty thousand word mark (about one fourth to one fifth of an average length novel). For shorter than novel length, I’m finding my sweet spot lies somewhere between one third and one half of an average length novel.

As you can see here, though, I do have a couple of short story collections, and I may soon release a third. I’m not totally against them. Like speed chess, taking on a short story does sharpen that part of my writing that needs to stay short, sharp and to the point. Sometimes I do manage to score the occasional win.

My short story collections

In addition to my novels, from time to time I write shorter works which I release in collections of 2-3 short stories under the overall series name of Voice of the Mute Tales. To see where that series name came from, you might want to check out the story by the same title in Volume 2.

Voice of the Mute Tales, Volume 1, a collection of 3 short stories
The Third Startup tells the story of a megachurch pastor who engineers his own firing and somehow lands working at an inner-city church start-up.
Ellie’s Choice portrays the illicit attraction between a precocious teenager and her older, married pastor and explores whether that love should come to fruition once he becomes a widower.
The Ignored follows the troubled life of a young girl whose parents ignore her. Learning that her efforts to regain their affection causes them pain, she must decide whether to forgive them.

Voice of the Mute Tales, Volume 2, is a collection of 3 short stories portraying slices and vignettes from the life of a boy growing up in Cuba. Semi-autobiographical in nature, these episodes relay some of my experiences as a young Cuban boy making my way in an oppressive society, and looking forward to a life of freedom in a not so distant land. I hope reading these stories gives you a slight glimpse of what life was like for me and my family back so long ago, and yet, just yesterday.