[Reading Room] We Will Teach You How To Read / We Will Teach You How To Read by Caroline M. Yoachim

This is why I love short fiction…

Reading Reading Cover - havy blue text reads 'Reading Room', on a white background with a colorful border above and below

This story was published in Lightspeed Magazine and included in the Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2025 anthology.

This story is a challenge to the reader — explicitly from the narrative voice as well as from the author: try to hold two things in your brain at the same time.

The story is told–mostly–in two columns. One of which is the same all the way through; the other tells more of the story of a species that is living fast and going extinct even as you read, and which is trying to get you to perceive life the way they do, and to remember them.

The Opening

Continue reading “[Reading Room] We Will Teach You How To Read / We Will Teach You How To Read by Caroline M. Yoachim”

3 Short Stories To Read Before May Begins

As we warm up for StoryADay May 2023, it’s always useful to read great examples of the kind of short fiction we might end up writing during May.

Here are three great (and a little weird) stories I’ve read over the past few months, to inspire you.

If you’ve ever thought “I can’t write a whole a short story,” maybe it’s because you haven’t seen all the weird and wonderful ways a short story can be built. It’s almost impossible to get it wrong!

Keep writing,

Julie

P. S. The free WRITER Code Masterclass is underway. If you want to write, but keep getting derailed, watch Lesson 1 now: in which I present a framework for a writing life that works for you, today, not ‘some day’.

[Reading Room] The Locked Pod by Malka Older

The Reading Room is a personal log of stories I’ve enjoyed, read through the eyes of a writer. Find more

This story plays really nicely into the idea of the Locked Room Mystery, only it’s an escape pod on a space station, and not just any space station but a cloistered world of intellectuals who have chosen a life of focus, mostly-ignoring the outside concerns of the universe.

The opening line is a doozy:

“When we opened the escape pod, the person inside it was dead.”

The mystery in the story is a classic ‘locked room’ mystery: a seemingly impossible to explain murder, and the solution is excellently suited to the setting of the story. (Well done, that author!).

I think mysteries work best when they misdirect and distract us with a compelling human story and this one certainly does that. We have a cloistered order of intellectuals to explore, one that is suddenly confronted with an outsider, and a dead one at that, AND we have a bit of a family story as the protagonist’s teenaged daughter enters the tale (with all the usual parental issues that come along with living through your child’s teenage years: communication missteps, a growing sense of separation, an acknowledgement that time with them is finite).

This story reminded me of the best of classic sci-fi: Asimov with a bit more character development, Clarke with a bit less tech, Heinlein without the weird sex stuff.

As a mystery AND Sci-fi fan I really enjoyed this brief visit to the words of Malka Older, and look forward to the novel. “The Mimicking of Known Successes” (Tor, 2023)

Said author Malka Older:

“Living through the past year two years five years, I’ve thought a lot about the power of comfort reading, and so I packed this book with elements that bring me joy: a slow-building romance; an atmospherically Holmesian mystery; a storied academic idyll (constructed from reclaimed satellites); long train rides across the bleak landscape of a giant gas planet, and tea in front of the fire on stormy nights. At the same time, I also found myself needing to write about ecosystem loss and communities in conflict between returning to what was normal in the past and forging a new future. It’s the banter-filled, yearning comfort read I needed in my life, and I’m so happy to send it out into the world.”

Tor.com

Find this story in the Sunday Morning Transport newsletter

[Reading Room] Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland

This collection is a great example of what modern speculative fiction can be: fascinating, compelling, peopled by sympathetic (and not-so sympathetic) characters; surprising and familiar, inspiring, filled with mystery and a sense of discovery for the reader…and I love it when stories are connected, so I enjoyed piecing together the connections between some of the stories in the collection.

Continue reading “[Reading Room] Cosmogramma by Courttia Newland”

[Reading Room] How The Trick Is Done by A. C. Wise

Photo by Sheri Hooley on Unsplash

I liked this a lot.

It managed to be about magic and death and unrequited love and #metoo and revenge and yet have a lightness and beauty that I often find missing in modern stories, and which is hard to pull off with those themes.

Continue reading “[Reading Room] How The Trick Is Done by A. C. Wise”

20 Short Stories That Will Make You A Better Writer

Don’t try to write short stories without reading some. Here are 10 modern and 10 classic stories to get you started.

Reading in front of the fire

Chosen by members of the StoryADay Superstars community

  • Perhaps you want to write short stories because novels seem overwhelming.
  • Perhaps you’ve been told that you ought to start with short stories.
  • Perhaps you read a short story you loved and thought “I want to do that!”

The rules for novels and movies don’t apply to short stories. Part of the fun of short story writing is that the form is so flexible.But how would you know that if you’re not reading them?.

Here are 20 great short stories you should read, suggestesd by the StoryADay community.

Each story is either a classic or one that stuck in the reader’s head for years.

storyaday divider
10 classic short stories printable iamge
10 modern short stories printable image
Continue reading “20 Short Stories That Will Make You A Better Writer”