My first short story collection, "A Place So Foreign and Eight More," is out! It should start appearing on store shelves this week. As with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I've made a bunch of the stories in the collection available online for free, under the terms of a Creative Commons license.
I'm trying some different stuff this time around. For starters, I'm only making one format available: ASCII text, wrapped to 80 columns. If you want another format, you're invited to do the conversion yourself and post a link to a downloadable version on the page for the story in question.
Short stories are naturals for electronic distribution. For starters, they're short. Durr. More important is that they're ephemeral. Short fiction is the cutting edge of the field, but the stories themselves usually vanish along with the current ish of the magazines in which they appear. That's depressing as hell, but it's also infopocalypic. I learned a lot of my form by reading and dissecting stories, and by writing them, iterating through different experiments quickly. Those stories are gone — might as well be gone forever.
Electronic editions mean that the stories will be in print forever — or for as long as there's an Internet. I'm really glad to have the collection on the stands and the stories on the Web. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. (Oh, and don't miss Bruce Sterling's intro, it's killer).
