365 Challenge: 28 Stories for February

Well, month two of reading and reflecting on short stories has been completed.  I'm still driving ahead.  This is my second reflection on the subject.  You can read my reflections for January here.  As things get busy with the semester, it can certainly be a challenge to stay on top of it.  I've created several ways of dealing with this that seem to be work.  

Strategy 1: A Few Good Anthologies

The first thing I make sure to do is to have a few anthologies on hand that contain a variety of length of short stories.  This helps me find a good story at the right length depending on the amount of time available.  Some days, I've got 20 minutes and other days, 1.5 hours.  I want to match up the time so I can get in the stories and stay on target.  

Strategy 2:  Keep It Varied

Part of the benefit of having several different anthologies around is that it also allows you to jump genres and styles.  Anthologies come in different styles--some are all written by the same author, others are bound by genre, others collected is representative across genres.  If I have a few on hand, I can move about them to keep things interested.  I learned this hardest with the Cats In Space anthology that was enjoyable but felt like I overdosed on kitties for a while (something I'm still not sure I can admit to happening and still look my kitties in the eyes).  

Strategy 3:  Build Up a Backlog

So technically, I'm suhpposed to be reading a short-story a day but that just doesn't always work, so some days I read two or three so that I stay atop of overall goal of 365.  Given how some of my days work, it's ultimately the best I can do.

With these strategies, it's certainly been more manageable and it continues to be fun.  I'm finding new authors that I like and returning to authors whom I haven't visited in a while (Asimov--I'm looking at you, bucko!).  

So here are some of the anthologies that I've been enjoying this past month:




For a full listing of all the short stories in this series, check out the category 365 Short Stories a year.




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