Anthologies

Here's what I'm doing right now: I have been thinking about a certain SciFi universe for many years, wrote many short stories that play in it. I've always been thinking of writing one of those big ass novel series you have mainly in Fantasy because that's what would do the plethora of ideas, fragments and so on justice.

But then I've never had the discipline to write anything that's

1. Bound to fail. There is no such thing as a German speaking market for Sci Fi, and what's there is under the iron rule of one or two publishing houses with very mighty editors and

2. I'm having a terribly hard time to stay concentrated on long texts. I can do shorts, but I know that all the longer stuff I write starts to suck after page 50 because I was losing interest.

Now I want to do the story of said universe in the form of anthologies - little snippets of information, not necessarily connected to the main story that's going all along. It jumps back and forth from it, sometimes telling of politics, then very human (well, not really) interest that's got no connection whatsoever. None of these stories is longer than 10 pages.

What do you think - good idea? Would you read something like that? Or do you prefer a long and 'solid' story told from the beginning to the end?

I'm thinking of making "THE novel", I'll finally do after all the Heck Backlash crap is squared away anthology style in the way Sin City/Pulp Fiction did it, which is, short stories that overlap at particular scenes.

Cept, for mine, all the stories would branch off of one scene.

I really, really, like that style, and it fits my ADD perfectly.

But, I have no idea if mine would fail, so I got no advice for ya.

Do it in English then!

^ Last time I translated a piece it was less than successful - no one even commented here. But then I was still admin at the time and they probably were afraid to speak their mind, as they should be

Any possibility these snippets could be written in/translated into English and pitched as standalone stories to, say, Asimov's or one of the other U.S. s/f mags? Sell a handful of 'em, and a book publisher's more apt to be interested in you. (Also, if you're unsure of your English skills - and I can't imagine why - you could pay an editing/translating service to polish your stuff.)

You can post them on wordforge.