(Image from cafepress.com)
Happy Hallowe’en to everybody! Below are links to new posts since the last update:
Katherine read “[Answer]” by F. Paul Wilson http://katenread.wordpress.com/2014/10/26/deal-me-in-week-43-answer/
Randall read Ray Bradbury’s “The Smile“.http://timeenuf.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-smile-by-ray-bradbury.html
Dale read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Merry Men” http://mirrorwithclouds.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/robert-louis-stevenson-the-merry-men/
I read my first Salman Rushdie “Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella Consummate their Relationship” https://bibliophilica.wordpress.com/2014/10/25/salman-rushdies-christopher-columbus-and-queen-isabella-consummate-their-relationship/ this is another Deal Me In “twin” as Dale also posted about this story just last week.
Our year of fifty-two stories is winding down. Has anyone else begun building a roster for next year? I came up with one of my four “suits” over the weekend – I’m doing a “stories published in The New Yorker magazine” suit (gotta put that digital subscription with access to the short story archive to good use, right?). I have ideas for my other suits, but I’ll keep them secret for now. 🙂 What are your short story reading plans for 2015?
Bibliophilopolis 
Katherine Nabity said,
October 27, 2014 at 7:06 pm
I’ve settled on three of my suites, but the fourth… Should it be Russians? Japanese ghost stories? Hawthorne? An emphasis on female writers? I can’t decide. I’m debating a double deck.
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Jay said,
October 28, 2014 at 7:33 am
I can certainly endorse a Russian authors suit, as that has been some of my favorite reading this year. I’ll probably still have a female authors suit too, which can naturally include many genres. Counting collections and ad hoc reading that isn’t part of Deal Me In, I’m pretty sure Ive been reading a double deck’s worth of stories for a few years.
I’m working on a one page flyer-type PDF document for DMI 2015, which, in addition to listing the basic idea and some online resources, will also include some of the DMI variations others have suggested or come up with like Randall’s DMI Lite (26 stories, which I was going to call the “Fortnight Variation” or the “Payday Variation”) and even a single suit variation with only 13 stories, drawn on the days of a full moon (13 of them in most years, including 2015!)
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Katherine Nabity said,
October 28, 2014 at 9:18 am
I like the full moon concept. I think I’ll add a suit of Russians and move “women in horror” to the full moons.
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Jay said,
October 31, 2014 at 7:13 am
I think next year, instead of making spades a suit for “darker” stories, I’ll save them for something else and make darker stories populate my lunar add-on. 🙂
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Returning Reader said,
October 31, 2014 at 4:09 am
Oh yes! Even as I race to catch up and complete my 52 stories for this year, I’ve got a plan for next year… I’ve enjoyed so much having one book of stories by various authors (The Granta Book of the African Short Story) as my main resource this year that I’d like to do the same next year. I’ve got on my bookshelf “My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty new Fairy Tales”, edited by Kate Bernheimer, and that’s the one I’d use. Only twelve more stories to make up the deck after that, and since I tried reading a story in Irish this time round, I’d like to include one in each of the four other languages that I can read: Irish, French, Italian and (perhaps, it would have to be simple) Spanish.
Now, where am I? Ah yes, moving on to review number 29 for this year, while the rest of you are nearly finished…
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Jay said,
October 31, 2014 at 7:20 am
It’s great to see you active again, Returning Reader! 🙂 I actually have that same book (My Mother She Killed Me…) that I’ve been meaning to get to for the longest time. Maybe I can let you help page the way for me…? I’ve also thought about including something along the lines of classic fairy tales (not too long ago I got Philip Pullman’s new English edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, of which the introduction was fascinating) or maybe some stories from The Arabian Nights.
The more I’ve gotten into short stories the more 52 stories in a year doesn’t feel like enough. 🙂
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Randall said,
November 1, 2014 at 9:34 pm
I’ve been mulling over my 2015 DMI plans — and have come up with nothing firm yet. 😦 However, I think I will be soliciting story suggestions via a contest on my blog in the near future, and that should help… and it will be fun.
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Jay said,
November 2, 2014 at 9:47 am
I’ve solicited recommendations for DMI before but never thoughtt to link it to a contest or giveaway or anything; that’s a great idea.
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