shortshortshort.com, August 2008

Apparently, “China Moss” is not only the title of a short short by Bruce Holland Rogers, but also a type of dessert, for which Rogers desires the recipe (please send it to him if you have it). In the story of that title, however, the dessert serves almost like a madeleine for Larry upon his return from Austin to Boulder, where he hasn’t lived for many years. China moss was a reminder of his younger days, when he was dating, when the world was simpler, and nothing he could make would recapture the taste or feeling of the long lost dessert.

“The Bad Reader” is a metafictional story which makes the reader into the protagonist. Just like telling someone not to think of green elephants, Rogers tells the reader what their thought processes should be as they read this exercise, scarcely a story. The story is a clever conceit, but more importantly, as Rogers points out in the last line, it will (or might) cause the reader to think about what they bring to the storytelling process.

“Tough All Over” addresses both the common new writers’ complaint about lacking a muse as well as the changes in the market, when buzz is as important, or more important, than the final product. When a novelist uses the money from his third book to pay for kitchen repairs, he finds that the constant work is disrupting his writing. Unlike many new writers, rather than embrace this excuse, the novelist turns it around and embraces the work as a new muse. Nevertheless, his agent informs him that book sales are based more on a gimmick than on the quality of the book. At the same time, the builder learns that sales are down due to a poor housing market and layoffs might be in order. The two men wind up finding a creative, and mutually beneficial, way of dealing with their issues.