Why short stories? Why not?
It would be presumptuous to think my little site could influence you — and you, too — in your reading habits. So let me presume.
I love short stories, perhaps the main reason I write them. Yet in the publishing world, all the glitz goes to the big projects — novels, and overloaded nonfiction tomes intended to help you live your life better, or understand how our forebears fumbled the ball in centuries past.
Anyway, short stories rock. Think of it like this. It’s like streaming TV. Most episodes of popular passive programming run a half hour. To check my assumptions, I asked Mr. AI, and here’s what he/she/it said: comedies often run for 22-30 minutes, while dramas are generally 45-60 minutes long.
So, you watch short stories. No novel condenses to 30 minutes. So you’re already there.
You can buy a book of short stories, read one, put a bookmark in, set it down, and when you have a spare half hour (or less, if your chosen writer likes the flash form, that is, stories of 1,000 words or fewer, about the length of a newspaper essay) you pick it up and snack on another tightly written tale. Like eating a hamburger, and we all love hamburgers, just not all hamburgers.