Once again, as always happens around payday, I found an Amazon parcel waiting for me when I got home. It’s the first of several that I’m expecting, although I wasn’t expecting it for some time yet.

The parcel contained Neil Gaiman‘s new short story collection Fragile Things, which I’d pre-ordered months ago and completely forgotten about, more-or-less expecting it to arrive at the end of October as did Anansi Boys in 2005.

It’s a lovely book, with a white cover that I don’t want to touch for fear of getting it mucky. For some reason the binding smells of potato peelings, which I suppose makes a change from all the other books that I have, which all smell of, well, bookishness

It has a crafted feel to it, as though it’s been put together from a lot of tiny intricate pieces that have to fit together just so for the whole thing to work, like a watch or the lenses of a really complicated telescope. In fact I suppose that’s exactly what it is, except the little pieces are called words, and each word is part of the intricate mind-maze that we call a paragraph, or an idea, or a dream…

Reading the introduction (all writers should take a course from Neil Gaiman in how to write introductions) got me thinking about short stories again. I don’t write them often enough, or at least I don’t give myself enough chance to let myself write them. It’s less about actually writing the story than a novel is, I think; A novel is like a sculpture of a horse or of a bird: all the details have to be there in perfect form for the thing to look and feel right. But in a short story you can sometimes just deal with the general shape of the bird or the idea of the horse, which can be much more rewarding, certainly in the short term.

I think I’m having ideas. I like short story collections.