Reading Jakob Nielsen's recommendations on writing web content in Designing Web Usability, one can't help but consider all the different kinds of text-based content that can't possibly be bulletized, chunked, or otherwise distilled to some web-friendly essence - like fiction, for example. There's no doubt that publishing fiction presents some serious usability problems for 'zine editors; nor is there any question that writers will continue producing stories of 5 or 6 or 10 thousand words. So what's an editor to do?

One answer, I suppose, is to focus on "flash" rather than standard fiction. This interstitial genre, which, at it's best features the kind of compression one normally associates with poetry, has certainly blossomed on the web - and out there in the bricks and mortar world it's even become the subject of courses and writers workshops.

There are a number of places to discover flash fiction if you haven't already done so. One is Vestal Review, edited by Mark Budman, who selects 6-10 pieces for each issue, many of them penned by Canadian writers. In one piece in the current issue (Issue 5), a woman, following a chance encounter with a shotgun-wielding farmer's pet rabbits, becomes a "werebunny"; in another, a wife watches impassively as her soon-to be ex-husband, bumped over a tableside railing by a mariachi guitarist, drowns in a Mexican river. In yet another, the language of noir fiction is hyperbolized ad absurdum.

As these brief descriptions indicate, the current VR tends toward lighter fare: entertaining, anecdotal flashes, some of which read like professionally-polished urban legends.

For some of the edgier work being written in this genre, look in at Prose Ax (http://www.proseax.com/) where the current issue features 2 excellent new flashes by Richard Payette ("The Gift") and Kenneth A. Champeon ("Hope").