About

My name is Christopher Marcus and I’m the creator of the two linked short story projects – linkedshortstories.com and shortstorycycles.com.

If you have arrived here of your own free will you probably have at least some idea of what a linked short story collection / short story cycle is, but just in case allow me to quote Forrest Ingram, who was the first modern writer to name and analyze the form:

“a short story cycle [is] a book of short stories so linked to each other by their author that the reader’s successive experience on various levels of the pattern of the whole significantly modifies his experience of each of its component parts” 

– Ingram, Forrest L. Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century. The Hague: Mouton, 1971, p. 19.

I have read lots of definitions of short story cycles and to be honest this one – the very first – is still as good as it gets for me.

So. Now that that’s cleared up … here’s a wee bit more about boring ol’ me:

I am a writer and researcher, who originally graduated with a Master’s Thesis in Strategic Communications here in Denmark, where I’m based, but since then I fell into the rabbit hole of writing fiction.

In the last 10 years, I have written mostly contemporary linked short stories and gotten ever more fascinated by the form.

The page you see before you is an overview of my projects in this regard!

First up is linkedshortstories.com which is intended to, well, list linked short story collections! 🙂 This is where you find all the fiction.

I also have an encyclopedic site, where I list academic materials about short story cycles. This is where you will find all sorts of analyses of the form.

If you have any recommendations for linked short stories (or academic work about them) which I should index – feel free to shoot me an email.

Lest I forget: I do write my own collections of linked short stories that tell the story of a family through three generations – from 1968 to 2068. You can find these stories on dependingonthemorningsun.com as well as links to various collections for purchase.

All of the sites above are labors of love and will be updated occasionally, as life permits.


Important update 2024!

I am really hamstrung for time and it doesn’t look like things will improve, so from 2024 I will only keep updating the index on linkedshortstories.com occasionally with the most important collections I find (i.e. the ones that really, really mean something to me personally)

And I will primarily concentrate on finding quotes from the individual authors about their craft, not links to homepages etc. which can easily be googled.

I do this because I have noticed during this site’s existence that, well, linked short story collections may be popular with new authors, but there is a very, very small audience actually looking specifically for the form. Most people probably don’t even know it exists! I’d like that to change, of course, but I also have to build on something that makes sense when I have very limited resources available for the site.

So I choose to focus on other writers, like myself, who love the form of linked short stories.

My theory is that it makes the most sense to link to bits about the craft, in that case, not some random interview about a collection in general!

Here is the Linked Short Stories Craft – Goodreads group: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/1207293-the-craft-of-writing-linked-short-stories

I will also index titles on my various lists, both on the site and Goodreads, but in a more ad hoc fashion and without notifications anywhere. You’ll just have to check the lists from time to time.

Alternatively you may follow this site via good oldfashioned RSS feed in an RSS Reader. The feed URL is linkedshortstories.com/feed/. Read more about this sadly somewhat forgotten method of following websites here: https://rss.com/blog/how-do-rss-feeds-work/

Shortstorycycles.com will also be updated occassionally from 2024 and onward and you can follow its feed via shortstorycycles.com/feed/.

I hope these changes won’t be too bothersome for my few followers, but that’s the nature of labors of love. It’s a bit like having a family, I guess. When the going gets tough, just have to power through the best you can do, and hope for better times 🙂

– Chris