Today is my sister’s birthday and, as previously mentioned, she has a law degree (hopefully she’ll soon receive good news about the bar exam). To to mark the occasion, over the course of the day Shred will publish a trio of lawyer stories from Gerald So, Art Montague, and Bob Wangard. Enjoy!
When filling out checks, I habitually write a story’s title in the memo field. And today, as I was writing “Killing Harry†on a check, I wondered if bank employees ever actually read those notes and wonder a bit.
In its quarterly incarnation, Shred published six stories per issue, original fiction that hadn’t appeared anywhere else. I still like the idea of quarterly webzines—as a reader, I tend to read many stories in a short period of time (either in a zine’s current issue, or delving into its archives), and then I may not return to that particular webzine for a while. (What can I say? I’m a gorger, not a grazer.)
But a steady dribble of content can make a site stickier, and that’s important. Bells and whistles like RSS can help, and making a site interactive also encourages frequent visits. Over the coming months I’ll be monitoring traffic and seeing if, by playing around with various site features, I can lure more fans. Shred is not now, and almost definitely never will be, a money-making venture. But I want to make a more concerted effort to find readers for the stories published here.
Those of you who write mystery and crime stories may have noticed changes to Shred’s guidelines. Hopefully the nuts and bolts are pretty self-explanatory, but I’d like to take this opportunity to sketch out the thinking behind the changes.
I consider original short stories to be the meat of the site. That’s what the webzine published for the first three years of its existence, and I’m proud of each issue. By publishing a story every other week, over the course of the year Shred will release about the same number of stories as on the quarterly schedule. But two weeks is a long gap, so I would like to run something during those off weeks.
The World’s Finest Mystery and Crime Stories: Fifth Annual Collection, edited by Ed Gorman and Martin H. Greenberg, Honorably Mentions “Favors” by your humble editor. While the publicity is very much appreciated, “Favors” was not published by Shred of Evidence. It originally appeared in the anthology The Blackest Death Vol. 1, available from Black Death Books. It is also reprinted online.