Short, Sharp, Shock! Bob Denton

Short, Sharp, Shock! – Back to My Writing – Back to Home Page

Every writer knows this feeling: you’re deep into a book, and suddenly a tangent appears – a side road that demands your attention. You follow it, explore it, research it, and only then can you return to the main narrative.

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Often these side-tracks prove useful, altering the main thrust of your story. But, just as often, they become an irritant, the literary equivalent of a piece of grit in your shoe. But sometimes, that grit attracts nacre – like the foreign body that inspires an oyster to build a pearl.

Short Sharp Shock! is a collection born from a series of those irresistible diversions. Each piece – whether a novelette, a short story, micro‑fiction or pico‑fiction — begins life as a nuisance that insisted on becoming something more. These are sharp, surprising, reality‑stretching tales that play with perspective, language, and the joy of following an idea wherever it leads.

That’s where these novelettes and short stories came from: side‑tracks to which I felt forced to return and look at more deeply. I then sought to endow them with my own form of nacre, hopefully resulting in a series of strong, resilient, iridescent pearls.

Short, Sharp, Shock! – What, precisely, is a short story?

How short is short? The established wisdom is that 1,500 to 7,500 words encompasses most short stories, with 7,500 to 25,000 words usually considered as more of a novelette. This collection features five short stories (#1 – Infatuation, #3 – Incarceration, #7 – Introspection, #9 – Inundation, #11 – Incubation) and two novelettes (#5 – Intensification and #13 – Induction).

Today, a story below 1,500 words usually claims itself as a flash fiction or a micro-fiction, a complete story that includes enough characterisation, some sort of conflict or denouement and a resolution. This collection features two micro-fictions (#6a – Interrelation and #12 – Imagination).

As a punctuation to these, I have included what I term pico-fiction, a story or verse that runs less than some 200 words. The compilation includes six pico-fictions. This compilation has five pico-fictions (#2 – Interception, #4 – Intervention, #6b – Inter relation, #8 – Inculturation, #10 – Internalisation).

Here’s an example, #4:

‘Look you’re my only hope, battery is almost spent…

You must help!… …I know how I must sound. Can you hear them trump?…
…the smell it’s cloying, like some abattoir or path-lab drain…
…the lights are too bright… …dazzling… …it’s like the worst sort of migraine.
Something moving in the lights… …can’t focus, but there is definitely something… …sour taste on my tongue… …hard to talk… …my senses overloading!

Funny, never believed in an end of days, or a Judgement Day…
…is this that?… …you must warn…’

1 – 4 – 7 – 1 – ‘Sorry the last caller withheld their number.’

None of this to imply that each short story is a part of something else, as you can see, they are each written as a fully rounded and stand-alone notion. Playful, sharp, unsettling, imaginative – each story stretches reality in its own way, perhaps providing a shock to the intellect.

I confess that I did have a little fun with the choice of story titles. These may take a little investigation, and hopefully promote some invigoration. My aim was simple inculcation and inspiration, I trust this usage does not promote indignation, infuriation or inappreciation. Rather, it was intended as an invitation to greater interpretation.

Short, Sharp, Shock! – Author’s observation: “This collection did indeed grow from the tangents that appeared as I wrote longer fiction or non‑fiction. Some of these ideas do influence and reshape the current tale; but others sit there unresolved until I return to them. Over time, these diversions accumulate, grit that demands attention. In revisiting them, I then tried to polish and shape them into worthy stories.‘ ‘Short Sharp Shock!’ is a handful of pearls that I encountered along the way.“