Debating about the Everfree Northwest Book Spot

So the news dropped today that a bunch of the folks who did the BronyCon Bookstore in 2019 are revving up for another go. This time, the location is Everfree Northwest in Bellevue, Washington, on August 11-13, with the book shop now being called Twilight's Book Nook.

Seeing this, I entered an internal debate. Not about whether I was going or not; being clear on the other side of the country, I didn't find it very feasible to go. I have more money than I used to, but I've reached the point where brony conventions aren't the first thing I throw funds toward. There's also little for me there in regards to friends or relatives, as all the people I used to know from the area have either passed away or moved to new locations further south.

Instead, my debate was whether or not to make a new collection to feature at the Book Nook. RBDash47 has stated that it's possible to arrange a couple of books to go there without actually going to the con.

What makes this tempting is that I actually have built up a new library of ten new stories since BronyCon 2019. While only six of them are print-worthy in my opinion, there's still about 35,000 words of material to make a small collection. Even better, four of the stories are Jinglemas stories, giving me an easy theme for the collection and no fear of repetition, as all the stories have phenomenally different characters and tones. The outlying two stories likewise feature deep emotional journeys for two characters and would be good tales for any story collection. I've also become more adept at editing and formatting, and would be able to present a much more polished work than my BronyCon Bookstore submission.

The central problem lies in the current length. As of right now, the combined length of all the stories is around 35,000 words, barely over digest-size in terms of book sizes. The book I sold at the BronyCon Bookstore, Endings, was around 53,000 words and took up just under 180 pages. If I combined the stories of my current library as is, there would probably be just over 100 pages of material. Not necessarily minuscule, but a bit on the low side in terms of story collections. Looking at Ponyfeather Publishing, the group helping with this contest, the lowest word-count story collection they have is GhostOfHeraclitus's "Tales from the Civil Service" at 54,000 words. It just makes my own proposed collection look kind of pathetic from a certain perspective.

Now, there's an obvious answer to this problem I'm sure many of you thinking: Just write more stories! That'll increase the word count! Quite true. The problem lays in my own selection process. Back in 2019, I made a somewhat presumptuous move in writing Endings, as I wrote a lot of those stories specifically for that collection. I seemed to have a somewhat arrogant belief that all of the stories would be winners, even though I only had some of them pre-read/edited. I realized not long after the convention that this wasn't a very creatively feasible tactic, as a couple of the stories were either too frantic or not tempered enough by experience and editorial oversight. While I'm not so much ashamed of Endings, I can definitely see that it was somewhat clunky in an overall quality sense. Thus, I don't want to pump out some stories in a short period of time just to meet some quota.

This also comes from my gradual realization that choosing stories for a collection largely comes down to the stories' overall quality, not their relation to a theme. I mentioned earlier that I had ten new stories since BronyCon 2019, but only six of them were "collection worthy". This is because I've had time to reflect on those four that fall short of what I think the threshold for quality is, and realize they aren't as good as they reasonably could've been. Time is required for reflection, and I doubt having a month (or less) to write a story, then ponder whether it is publication worthy would produce solid results.

So the question I want to put forward is this: Is submitting a 35,000 word short story collection "okay" in the creative sense? Would you buy a collection that size (not necessarily mine, but any collection that size)? I won't hinge my decision on your reactions, but I'm curious to see how you all feel about a smaller collection like that.