Niched

I've been ruminating on story ideas for a while now and I believe it is time to approach the page and get some of them down. I have been avoiding it for a while now and I'm feeling cowardly. Also, in avoiding the page I am allowing for thoughts of inadequacy and failure to creep into my thoughts. I have actually had a couple of moments where I have doubted the endeavor as a whole.

Here is one of those moments:

I'm meeting people in Barnes and Noble, not a bookstore I frequent but a convenient meeting place. I'm early. I'm an hour early and I'm actually looking forward to spending some time browsing the fiction and literature section of the store. Bad idea. I have my letter from my second packet with me and there is a list of short story collections that Jack sent me included in its pages. I go down the list of 10-12 books and I find a total of three. I had no plans to buy the books here having recently found a quaint independent bookseller a couple of miles from my house but I begin to realize that this is where most people by their books, at big box stores like this, if not at the grocery store.

I decide to try an experiment and look up the faculty members of our program to see what kind of exposure they are getting in this big box store. Pete: No. Jack: No. Claire: No. John: No. Craig: No (this one surprises me, being in Oregon and all). Valerie: No. Judy: Yes. David: No. I know it is a small branch of the big box, being located in an outlying strip mall attached to a mall but I begin to see how narrow of a niche we are afforded in this industry. Also, I begin to notice the sheer lack of short stories present on the shelf.

In addition, I begin scanning all of the title names and looking at the cover art and I begin to see a pattern. There are a lot of books with "shoes", "men", brand names, and other chick lit cliches dominating the shelves. The art is often of fashion items, makeup, or women in independent poses. I'm not disparaging the fact that women deserve literature of their own, that speaks to them and addresses their issues but it just begins to overwhelm me. I realize how much of a niche market I am really working in. Not just in the subject matter that I write in but also that I work solely in short stories at the moment. It was a daunting realization but tonight I am taking time to confront the page and my own insecurities and I'm hoping to write past all these troubling thoughts.

Wish me luck.