Received wisdom of traditional publishing: Short stories don’t sell. They win literary prizes like stink, but they don’t sell. You can write short stories but only a magazine wants them. Write novellas and it’s even worse. WTF does a publisher do with a novella?

Fact of epublishing: You can do what you want.

Example: Alexis Hall has just published a wonderful novel called Prosperity. When I say wonderful I mean one of the best things I’ve read this year: playful, linguistically inventive, sexy, fascinating, exciting, fun. It focuses on the (often morally questionable) crew of an airship in a steampunky Victorianish setting. And it’s the first of a whole raft of stories set in the same universe, giving the backstories of the (really quite significantly morally questionable, not kidding) crew. And the author tells these stories at varying length, short or long short or novella, one free, romping all over the place, back and forth in time, because he can.

And Riptide Press just went, ‘Uh-huh,’ and published this collection of stories because they could.

I served two decades in trade publishing, most recently for a house that considers itself innovative, and I can promise you, if I’d brought this to a sales meeting someone’s head would have exploded. Like, actually. Bits of grey matter and bone and squidgy stuff on the walls. I can hear the moans of “How do we publish it, how do we sell it?” rising like the wails of the damned.

But this is the wonderful world of electronic, where shelf space and outward facing stock issues and how do we print this length and get a spine on it / Jeez Louise, we’ll have to use tissue paper if it’s not to be two volumes are simply not issues. Where you can, if you must, publish The Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay at fifteen pages with nothing to hold you back but the weeping of your ancestors. Where you can take a chance.

And, as a proud part of this go getting forward-thinking future world, I’m planting my feet firmly in 1894.

~~~~FLASHBACK~~~~ (supply your own wriggly motions and fade effects please)

Some time back I wrote a short story for a Halloween anthology, The Caldwell Ghost, about Simon Feximal, a Victorian occult detective, and Robert Caldwell, a journalist with a haunted house. I released a freebie with the same characters, Butterflies, because I could. (Remember the days when, if an author wanted to give away a 10,000 word story, she basically had to write it out longhand and post it to people?)

Then Jordan L Hawk and I realised that her occult detectives Whyborne and Griffin and my Caldwell and Feximal were separated by nothing more than nationality, an ocean, and a major attitude problem. We had illegal amounts of fun taking turns in writing a joint free story, Remnant. (If you’ve read Whyborne & Griffin, you will appreciate just how cool it was for me to have Whyborne to play with, and if you haven’t read W&G, get on it.)

The only thing was, Remnant takes place five years after Butterflies. Something significant must have happened in Robert and Simon’s life since, given their job, but what? I threw some plates in the air to see if they span or crashed, wrote about how Robert now has a mysterious metal plate embedded in his hand and a scar under his eye, and have been fielding questions from readers about WTF happened between Butterflies and Remnant ever since.

~~~~FLASHBACK ENDS~~~~

Here’s the thing. The great Victorian/Edwardian stories of Carnacki the Ghost-Finder to which Simon Feximal is direct homage, and more generally the detective stories of Sherlock Holmes, Father Brown, Simon Carne, Raffles, Hagar of the Pawn-shop, and all the other late 19^th century pulp that I could quite seriously read forever if they had a bit more sex¹, are basically all written as stories told in separate, self contained installments. Yes, there are Holmes novels, but really, they are just very long shorts. The development of it all is episodic, individual adventures, dropping in and out of the characters’ lives as the author sees fit. Nothing happened for two years? Skip it. Wish the hero hadn’t married? Jump five years and kill her off.

This is a quite different thing to writing a novel of great scope, doing your MCs from cradle to grave in one book. These are separate stories, some of which stand alone, some of which are closely linked, which don’t have to be all thematically linked as a novel does, which can introduce and drop characters, jump years, change moods, do all kinds of different things, yet still show you the characters’ lives at key points.

It’s not the same as a novel. Quite possibly it’s not what a lot of readers, used to novels, will be looking for, and for all I know many of you guys will wonder if I’ve been snorting absinthe again.² But it is the only way the story of Robert and Simon is going to tell itself.  It’s that great unpublishable thing, a short story collection.

The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal will be coming from Samhain next summer, and I’m doing it because the wonders of electronic, and agile publishers willing to take chances, and a readership that’s focused on story rather than format, mean I can.

Isn’t the future cool?

¹ My mission in life: To write these with quite a lot more sex.

² Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.

KJ Charles’ latest release is Flight of Magpies. Follow her on Twitter @kj_charles.