Last night I received an email from my good friend Ian Mond suggesting that it might be time to wind up the Last Short Story podcast. We’d started it, along with our Not if You Were the Last Short Story on Earth colleagues, last October in a fit of energy and enthusiasm. We would, we thought, do a monthly podcast devoted to discussing just a single new collected work of short fiction.

It seemed like a good idea. It seemed like a great idea. But there was an underlying truth behind it: we were doing it because we were struggling to keep up with all of the short fiction coming out and many of us were tired and some just wanted to read a novel or two.

We produced a six or seven episodes, and then began to run out of steam. Ian’s email just stated what we all knew and, once he’d said it, we all knew it was time. My sincere thanks to Ian, Tansy, Alex, Tehani, Alisa, and everyone else. It was fun to do, but we’ve closed the podcast. It’s now offline, though we may look for some kind of repository for the episodes in future.