Pyle wanted to hear Ben LeRoy talk about How To Get Happily Published, but so did everybody else. There were no empty seats.

So Pyle went next door to hear Tony Simmons on The Short Story.

He hadn't seen Simmons that day.

Pyle figured he wasn't coming.

He thought about what he'd say about The Short Story if he took over, and just started talking.

A novel is a prose narrative between 50,000 and 150,000 words with a cast of characters who interact with each other and, in the course of the book, resolve some conflict. It's usually set in a particular place, which gives a feel to the atmosphere, a sort of mise-en-scène.

A novella is shorter than a novel. 25,000 to 50,000 words. One translation of novella is novelette.

A short story is 2,000 to 3,000 words, but it may be shorter.

Erskine Caldwell wrote a story that read, "A man walked into a restaurant, through the front door, and ate all he wanted to eat."

A short story between 5,000 and 10,000 words is a long sorry. You'll have trouble placing it.

If he got into what to do with a short story after you'd written it, that could take up the rest of the hour.

A few minutes after the class was scheduled to start, Michael Lister came in and said Tony Simmons wasn't going to make it, we should just have a discussion among ourselves on the topic.

Pyle looked at Jonathan Woods, who Mike introduced at the opening session as a presenter. He had a new book of short stories coming out in April from a small press, New Pulp Press, called Bad Juju & Other Tales of Madness and Mayhem.

With a book of short stories coming out he was more of an authority on the subject than Pyle was. Pyle didn't have anything coming out.

He didn't even send out stories anymore.

Woods had been an attorney in a corporation and knew how to get a meeting going. He had meeting moderating skills.

He took the bit in his teeth and ran with it.

He said there used to be more paying outlets for short fiction than there were now, and most short story collections were collections of literary fiction that had appeared in little magazines specializing in servicing university writing programs--that is they weren't about anything, except maybe themselves. They were self-referential. They were ingrown. They didn't reach out. They didn't try to connect.

But you could publish stories online if you didn't expect to get paid for them. It was good practice writing them, and you'd see them in print, or on a computer screen, and you'd get in touch with other people who were doing the same thing.

Pyle noticed Glynn Alam sitting in the classroom. She was a returning presenter. She published a series of mysteries about a woman who was a linguistics professor and an adjunct diver for the sheriff's department. Her series character dove in caves and sinkholes around Tallahassee. She herself was an older woman, and didn't look much like Anna Roper. But Pyle didn't look exactly like Mark Spitz, himself. He looked more like Meyer the economist. Travis McGee's sidekick. Or Gabby Hayes. Roy Rogers' sidekick.

Pyle's diving days were over. His body-surfing days were over.

One time he sent John M. Bennett a book of poems about fishing, spearfishing, and body-surfing in South Florida, and Bennett thanked him for the "fishing stories."

Pyle was reduced to riding in the glass-bottom boat, at Wakulla Springs, or taking the jungle cruise, with the other tourists. The tourists from Germany.

German tourists came to Wakulla Springs. American tourists went to Disney World.

Pyle slipped out of the classroom a few minutes early, to sidle over to the lunchroom, to get a good seat, to hear Michael Lister interview Michael Connelly, at lunch, and Glynn Alam slipped out of the door right behind him.

They didn't walk together but they ended up sitting together at the same table, at lunch.