Short stories

News Flash - PfoxChase just published my new short story collection: "Filtered Light and Other Stories is now available as e-book on Amazon, Amazon UK. This is the full 18 story set as e-book. It will soon be available at Smashwords too, and later as softcover.

After I had finished Tulagi Hotel, I was surprised to find myself writing short stories. The first one was "The Summerhouse", completed in April 2008; it opened the floodgates, and I wrote sixteen stories within a year. As I am an IT person, I started an Excel sheet right away, and this has helped me manage the workflow. Currently there's 109,422 words in 33 finished stories and 12 stories with 23,366 words in progress.

I have been very fortunate in getting a publisher who will soon publish an eighteen story collection of my short stories. This volume will feature all of my favored topics: there's speculative fiction, science fiction, humor, real life, and flash fiction - something for everyone. I will post links to it as soon as it is available.

My work has received some success in competitions. For example, "Lord Stanton's Horse" won the Flash500 competition in September 2010, "The Campsite vol. 1" took a Highly Commended at the Global Short Story competition in March 2011, and "What I Carved" was selected for publication in Leaf Publishing's Memoirs competition 2011. Shortlisted works include "The Farewell Tour", "Over the Bridge", and "Think Positive".

Other published stories are "Stuorra-Jouni" (The Cosmos Pen, July 2011), "She Blinded me with Science" and "The Crib" in Words to Music, 2010, and "The Ephemeral Man" in Bits, Bobs, and Baubles 2010. Many other stories have seen e-zine and website publication.

My short stories seem to revolve around transitions; life to death, working life to retirement, childhood to adult life etcetera. I have no conscious reason why this should be so, but as I always let the subconscious produce whatever it wants, I've not tried to steer myself in any one direction. In a way, I envy authors like John Updike, who can stick to their chosen field in their stories, but also Roald Dahl, who wrote absolutely first-rate stories in any genre. My other favorite authors are Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Veikko Huovinen, a sadly neglected, untranslated Finnish master.

To start the samples, I'll offer you the following stories:

Frans the Janitor - fifty years on, his past catches up with him.
The Campsite vol. 2, The Grind - further escapades of camp site supervisors
Cavalcade - why it's not a good idea to take photos at graveyards, and
Maneschijn - the dangerous hobby of a District Attorney.

There's also a free five-story set, please download the sampler file (814kb, PDF).

I hope you like these - remember the book is coming out with more! And if you'd like to get in touch with me, the address is heikki dot hietala at sabulo dot com.