If there’s no one to read them, do my words truly exist?

This angst-laden question is posed by the narrator of my latest short story Markets of the Otherworld now live at Uncanny Magazine. But it could be mine – in the spirit of the famous question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?”

The answer, of course, is no. Sound requires ears. If there are no ears to hear, there is no sound. Stories, similarly, require listeners or readers. Existence in the...