Shared Words: Volume One

by Deneen Ansley, Sue Bowers, Joel Byers

In this book you will find an eclectic collection of drabbles (100 word stories) from an even more eclectic collection of authors.

Each one is exactly 100 words (not including the title) and was written specifically for one of 50 illustrated prompts.

358 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 26, 2014

Reviews

[J.R. Gershen-Siegel · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the interests of full disclosure, I was sent a review copy of this work, in expectation of an honest review.

This is a curious book. It is a ton of drabbles (a drabble is exactly 100 words long), written by several independent authors in response to prompts which range from pirates to paranoia.

Drabbles, by their very nature, get the reader into a story and then unceremoniously dump him or her out. This is a characteristic of the format. I believe the book would have benefited a lot from rolling with that and taking advantage of it. That would have included a smaller size (this is one HEFTY paperback volume) for this kind of 'dip in briefly, then depart' style of reading. It would also have benefited from a different slice of the available work. There were some themes and they were great, old familiar friends after a while, but it would have made more sense to group at least some of them together. E. g. Matt and Charlie's Wilder Investigations, the sketches of Savannah, the Annunaki, and the 'I'm an idiot' support group were a shade too disjointed, and that was due to, simply, the sort order of the drabbles.

In no particular order, here are some of my personal favorites:
* Imperfect sync
* Pink
* Oktober
* Trust Me
* God School
* Byte Out-of-Life
* Caught
* Denial and Deception
* Crash
* Divine
* Job Interview #42A
* Science Minute
* Now Announcing

There is a lot of good in this group and a lot of talent. I am expecting greater works in the future. Go drabbles, and go Team Shared Words!

[Ed Ashford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shared Words: Volume One is a collection of (at my count) approximately 384 short stories that are all exactly 100 words each. Some are sad, some funny, and some are more like a poem than a novel, but they all manage to tell a story in 100 words and nothing more or less.

I loved how this book stretched some of my ideas about how stories work. I normally don’t look at 100 words as a good space to tell a story, but it was amazing to me how long some of the stories in this book felt compared to my usual idea of a hundred words. Some of these had me laughing out loud and sharing the book with the people around me! Definitely a great book for reading in little snippets here and there, or all at once if you prefer.

The one thing I was less fond of with this book was how the stories were grouped together by subject/prompt. This surprised me, because I normally love this type of organization in anthologies. But when the stories are this short, and you sometimes have stories with very similar content, it gets a little less interesting to read several stories of a similar nature. However, this was really a very tiny problem, and not enough to detract from the book for me.

This book is fantastic for anyone looking for a book to read in small spurts through a busy schedule. Because it only takes a minute or two to read one of the stories in here, you can read it around town without having to be paranoid about being forced to stop in the middle of a scene. You can read it in the doctor’s office, on the train, or during bathroom breaks without having to worry about finding a good place to stop.

I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.