When trying to publish short fiction, categories surrounding word counts significantly influence which story sizes and shapes are most common. If an author has a story a couple or few hundred words past the 1,000 word mark, getting into flash fiction markets incentivizes them to shorten. Similarly, once passing that threshold, nothing keeps them from writing toward the prime traditional short story length of 3,000-5,000 words to maximize the number of markets that story can be submitted to.
This leaves a little area in between that doesn’t see many stories land there. We put that truly weird range at the 1,200-1,700 word mark (though this anthology will allow stories up to 2,100), but even stories around 2,000 words are rare at short story markets compared to those closer to 3,000 or 4,000. Basically, the nature of the categories in the marketplace leaves certain sizes and shapes of stories with less representation than one might expect, because relatively few of them are written. They just don’t fit.
So, we thought, what if we gave writers a place that was exclusively for these stories? What if we set writers the task of purposely writing a story too long for flash fiction markets but briefer than most short stories that appear in traditional short story markets? What sorts of unique, interesting tales might we get? We hope to find out.
Collected herein will be a series of tales that slip between the scopes the various publications are generally looking for. These are fast reads, but there are many of them, and they will stay with you. Upon a successful funding of this project, Calendar of Fools will have an open call period for small, misfit stories that will live alongside the ones by our accomplished anchor authors. Come up with those odd ideas and send them to us.
Stories by:
- Henry Herz
- Sunny Moraine
- Rebecca E. Treasure
- Shiv Ramdas
- Erin Roberts
- Jason Sanford
- R. R. Virdi
- with a foreword by Jean-Paul L. Garnier
- edited by David A. Elsensohn
Launching on
