Natural Selection

As part of my continuing experiment with electronic publishing, I have added my short story “Natural Selection” to my eBook store.  When this story was originally published last October in Cantaraville, wrote extensively about how it came to be written in my post “Into the Abyss.” When I workshopped this story nearly two years ago at The New York State Summer Writers Institute, it was the summer before the economic meltdown, from which we are hopefully beginning to recover.  In previous years, my workshop had been a fairly even mix of young and old writers.  That year, however, the workshop was a lot younger, including a group of undergraduates from Princeton who I assume were students of Joyce Carol Oates, who teaches there.  There were some very talented writers among them and the analysis and criticism of the stories we workshopped during those two weeks, including mine, was excellent.  I could tell, however, that they were a bit shocked by my offering which gave them a bleak preview of what awaited them out in the working world.  By now most of them have finished, or are finishing, their four year degrees.  Maybe my story convinced some of them to stay away from the corporate world and are now in graduate school.   For those who aren’t, those who chose to enter the lion’s den, I hope the story resonates with them in a positive way and shows them the dangers of cynicism and how easy it is to forget what really matters in life.  We’ve been doing that too long in this country.  Hopefully, those students will choose a path with a heart.

In the coming weeks, this mini-eBook, along with the others, will also be available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the Apple Bookstore, Kobo, and Sony.  The folks at Smashwords have been working their butts off implementing all of the distribution deals that they have been put in place.  Given the fragmentation of the eBook market that currently exists, where the retailers each have their own formatting requirements (unlike the world of print publishing), Smashwords is solving a real problem in bridging the technology gap and helping authors reach as many readers as possible.  It’s exciting to watch and to be a small part of Smashword’s quest.