Short stories

Spent today rewriting a short story. Like the others, it has an Aztec theme - one that's almost topical, as it's about the ritual that I suspect may have evolved (very much changed) into the modern custom of Trick or Treat. But more of that later, maybe in a couple of weeks when it is topical.
Short stories are funny things. At one time writers could, allegedly, make quite a comfortable living out of them, but those days are long past. Now the market is so small - a few highly specialised genre magazines and literary competitions and that's about it, really - that everybody concentrates on novels. In my case I tried writing short stories long ago, but gave up when I sold my first book, and had pretty much come to the conclusion that I was strictly a long-distance runner. But I was asked for something for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine a few years ago and, rather to my surprise, found that I could do it. I've now sold four of them, and had one picked for an anthology. Hopefully this one will appear in print somewhere too.
The real surprise, though, is how much I enjoy writing them. Short stories are hard work. You can cock up a page or two of a novel, or a chapter even, and as long as it's not right at the beginning, nobody really notices if the rest's good enough. A single bad sentence in a 5000 word story is fatal. And of course you have to do all the work of plotting and character creation and everything else every 5000 words and not every 100 000 or so. More to the point, readers have to make more effort, and pay closer attention, for the same reasons.
But, as with anything else that involves a lot of effort, when it works, it's enormously rewarding.