How I assembled a collection of 10 short stories
In early 2024, I published my debut collection Different Kinds of Defiance. This is what I felt was relevant to decide what would go in it.
In late 2022, I felt it was that time.
I’ve been publishing short fiction since 2020 (and writing in English since 2016; and since 2013 in general). By the end of 2022, I had enough solarpunk and climate fiction short stories out there and some fresh pieces to build a collection. I already had a publisher in mind (Android Press), though I hadn’t pitched them anything yet. First, I had to decide what made sense to go in this collection, which stories would be a good fit. Then, I had to proceed with that nefarious task that some authors excel at and others struggle with (sometimes they're the same person): picking a title.
The ones left behind
I had 11 stories that I considered solarpunk, climate fiction, or tangential enough to those subgenres, plus one that was sort of unfinished at the time. I knew that 10 was a good number for a collection and I was determined to go with it. But first I had some decisions to make: which two of those stories would not be part of the collection, and why?
The unfinished piece was a solarpunk story set in what I call Rioverse and it still needed some work. It had been primarily written in Portuguese, so translation would be part of the work. Not only that, but it needed some editing as well. However, those weren’t the reasons why I didn’t pick it. My main reasons for not selecting this piece were: 1. I didn’t want to overuse the setting (a near-future, flooded version of Rio de Janeiro); 2. I thought that the tone didn’t match. Of all my stories, this one is kind of the cutest one (because it has a bunch of dogs, among other reasons). And though it’s definitely Solarpunk and I love how it turned out in the end, I had a gut feeling that it wasn’t really fitting with the rest of the stories.
The second piece I didn’t pick was Wet Socks Drying in the Tide, a story about friendship, immigration, and welcoming others in your community (with mechas and a muddied city ravaged by climate inaction) that was later sold to Solarpunk Magazine and is still going to be published. The sole reason I didn’t pick this one is that I envisioned it in a magazine first, so I left it out. It will certainly be in a second collection, though!
The translation
The only translation in the collection (Portuguese to English) is the longest story in it: The River that Passed Through My Life. This one was originally published in Portuguese by Editora Dame Blanche in 2021 with a beautiful cover by William Rabello. It’s the story of Néia, a former teacher who allies with a wealthy scavenger to retrieve a relic in the canals of Rio de Janeiro. It has karaoke in space, fast-paced boat chases, betrayals, and a lot of what takes to build a society in a crumbling metropolis.
I loved writing it, translating it, and I was certain that it had a spot in the collection.
The order
With all the stories picked, I didn’t want to just throw them into a doc and build a TOC. I needed to figure out in which order they would appear. I talked with my friends Dante Luiz and Jana Bianchi, both of whom shed lights on how I should reason when thinking abour ordering.
First, I didn’t want all the stories set in the Rioverse to come together as not to exhaust the reader with similar settings. So I spaced them out a bit. The fast-paced Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build a Hospital opens the collection. The slowest, inward-driven When It's Time To Harvest sits in the middle, and The River That Passed Through My Life closes it. By the way, as the longest of them, I also decided it was good to close the collection with The River That Passed Through My Life, but also because I think its ending has a deep feeling of closure regarding not only survival, but also on how to live beyond (and coexist with) the climate catastrophe and the all the fight that it entails.
Another thing that I planned was where to put the longest and the shortest stories. I didn’t want long stories to cluster together as to give the reader some space to breathe. So, that’s how it ended up in terms of word count. (Yes, I made a graph just because.) Notice how the wordcount goes up and down?
Are those good advices for people assembling collections of short stories? I’m not sure. There are many ways to do it and that’s just one of them. If you read Different Kinds of Defiance, you probably have a better notion whether it worked for you.
One thing I also considered was ordering thes stories from the most pessimistic to the most optimistic. But I decided it wouldn’t work. It’s not easy to single out what’s most and less utopian/dystopian. Some of the stories have layers so deep that it can be both hopeful and despairing at the same time. It would depend on who is reading, from where is the reader, and when they are reading—and, of course, how the story is interpreted. For example, Soil of Our Homes, Storm of Our Lives sounds pretty optimistic when it comes to dealing with the consequences of a climate-impacted world, but it still depicts a world suffering from mass migration.
(But if you ask me, I think I can pick the most hopeful and the less hopeful. The most hopeful has to be Look to the Sky, My Love where the external conflict is simply a love letter and the world seems a pretty good place to live. But it’s a sad story when it comes to the main character’s loss. And the most pessimistic would be Even Though You’re No More, where no humans survived at all.)
The title
Oh, damn. Coming up with titles for stories is already a challenging task—though with some pleasant aha! moments at times—so thinking about one for a collection seemed another significant challenge.
The first thing I wanted was to avoid the “and other stories” suffix. I don’t dislike it and I know it clear states on the cover that the book is a collection of short stories by a given author. But I love the simplicity of titles like Exhalation, by Ted Chiang, or the ingenuity of Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado.
Of the stories in the collection, I love the title of A Shoreline of Oil and Infinity, and even pondered using it as the collection’s title even if I needed to add “and other stories” as a suffix. This title also brings the duality of dystopia x utopia present in the collection.
Another option would be using part of the title of Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Build a Hospital. Dante Luiz came up with the idea Eight Steps to Steal a Yacht and Other Stories. It’s a striking—even if big—title, but, as he pointed out, it would work better in a collection with eight stories.
The last option would be to use the title of the shortest story in the collection: Different Kinds of Fury. “Different Kinds” bestowed it with a sense of collective things, but “fury” felt a bit off. What did I do? I reread the story (which was previously unpublished but read live at a Space Cowboys event) and thought there was enough room to edit it a bit and change the title to Different Kinds of Defiance.
That one finally translated very well what I wanted to convey with the collection: that every story contained in it some form of defiance: about questioning the status quo and/or ourselves; about daring to change the world where we live; about picking our fights.
Tidbits
My story The Offer of Peace Between Two Worlds, published at Diabolical Plots, was recommended by Charles Payseur at Locus Magazine.
Bernardo tells an aching tale of two people who are also one person, as they struggle separately and as they bound together through the universe, traversing galaxies, fiercely protecting their freedom and each other. There is a vibrant joy that infuses the work even as there is a heartbreaking sadness, recognizing that time will do the job that fleets of enemy ships could not in separating one being back into two, and then into one who can never be whole.
My dystopian piece The Plasticity of Being, published at Reactor/Tor.com, was reviewed by Danai Christopoulou at Haven Spec.
The Plasticity of Being is also about joy, family and community—and how, even in dire times, food remains the glue that bonds us all together.
My Nebula-finalist novelette, A Short Biography of a Conscious Chair, will be reprinted and narrated to audio at Podcastle.
One of the tiers in Apex Magazine's 2025 Kickstarter is 5 epubs of Different Kinds of Defiance. For $35 you’ll get: the collection, a subscription to Apex, and access to their Discord server.
I sold my second story to Ann VanderMeer at Reactor/Tor.com. It’s called The Hungry Mouth at the Edge of Space and the Goddess Knitting at Home, and it’s a science fantasy piece about the pacts we make with ourselves and our loved ones, but also about Brazilian street markets and hungry gods coming to collect debts. It shall be out in 2025.