I have a new piece up at Hobart. A short piece. Flash fiction. It’s about baseball. If you’re not a baseball fan, don’t worry, it’s very short. If you are a baseball fan, rest assured there is much baseball goodness packed into those couple of hundred words. Baseball flash.

I wrote the piece a while ago — when exactly? can’t say — but its publication has me thinking about length, probably because, despite my best efforts at concision, the story I just finished a draft of (title withheld, in case I decide it’s awful and I never want anyone to see it, so I spray it with perfume and then hold a match to it, whispering Goodbye, goodbye… as the smoke and ashes float up into the sky) came in at just over 15,000 words, or about 75 times longer than the Hobart piece. That’s quite a range. And yet they’re both complete stories, and recognizable as such, with beginnings, and middles, and ends. I don’t believe in the writer as medium, channeling something mystic that already existed in the ether but which required a sensitive conduit to lay it down in type. I think you make stuff up. But some stories, despite one’s belief in brevity, just need more words while others, apparently, need only a few.

Hobart, if you aren’t familiar, is a great magazine which exists on paper and in pixel form. The editors love stories and poems and baseball, which seems about right to me. April is dedicated to baseball-related content, in fact, which is why my piece gets the chance to grace their homepage.

A word of thanks to Aaron Burch for taking the story and for shining it up so.

Direct link: http://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/edwards-on-the-next-flight-out-of-town