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Mile 81

3.47 of 5 stars 3.47 · rating details · 7,460 ratings · 982 reviews

At Mile 81 on the Maine Turnpike is a boarded up rest stop on a highway in Maine. It's a place where high school kids drink and get into the kind of trouble high school kids have always gotten into. It's the place where Pete Simmons goes when his older brother, who's supposed to be looking out for him, heads off to the gravel pit to play "paratroopers over the side." Pete,...more

ebook, 80 pages

Published September 1st 2011 by Scribner

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Sep 24, 2011 Lou rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: september-list

It is two weeks surrounding the Easter holidays the slowest time of the year on the nation's turnpikes, and the afternoon is the second-slowest time of the day, the hours between midnight and 5 am is the slowest time. One abandoned service stop on Mile 81 is about to receive some helpful traffic.
We have all driven on the rapid fast lane but time and tiredness takes it toll on our souls and a long overdue rest is always advised but where? After reading this you may think twice on exactly where y...more

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Sep 03, 2011 Kristopher Kelly rated it 3 of 5 stars

Great story for a quick flight from Logan to New York. I'm not going to say too much about the plot, since the story's so short, but I'll say that, once again, it's the people not the monsters that King draws best. Something bad happens at an abandoned rest stop, do you really need more? Most of the characters meet a terrible fate, and it's King's ability to make you care so quickly about them that steals the show. Also, the atmosphere of the abandoned rest stop is outstanding. Loved every creep...more

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Oct 05, 2011 AJ rated it 2 of 5 stars

The story itself was fun. Another King story with vehicles included. From Christine, a Buick 8, Pet Semetary, Big Trucker and others, vehicles seem to be popular characters or have a role in the storyline in many stories. A small cast that struck home with me and sucked me in was great. However the ending seemed to be cut short. Similar to the Colorado Kid, I'm left thinking what next. Maybe elongated to a novella with more character development and increased conflict with the cast would ease my...more

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Sep 18, 2011 Adam Wilson rated it 3 of 5 stars

All right, Mile 81 seems to be a little novella thrown out there to make us desperate and starving King fans happy, if only for an hour or so. It did not impress me at

all though. The story was fun, but it seemed like different versions of several of King's short stories and novels including Christine (obviously), From A Buick 8, The

Raft, and The Mangler. A car comes out of nowhere and for some reason decides to stop at a closed road stop at Mile 81. If anyone touches it, they die, horribly. I...more

7 likes · like · see review

Sep 02, 2011 Michelle rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: kindle, stephen-king

A good short read. I found this to be a good story and it kept me involved. When it reached the end though, I felt a little like I was reading the ending of a different story. The ending didn't work for me. I think on the whole it did work for the story and kept it short and to the point. I felt that who I thought was the main character got lost when the car rolled on to the scene. While reading I was reminded of both From A Buick 8 and Christine.

3 likes · like · see review

Aug 07, 2012 Kathryn rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: own, horror-read, short-stories, stephen-king-read, 2012-read

Mile 81 was pretty good. I actually thought the store would be the crux of the horror, but I was proved wrong. I kind of like how sometimes King just ends a story abruptly, and this is one instance I did think the ending fit, especially with how sudden the car appears, does what it needs to do, and is gone.

This is a quick read. One you can read in 45 minutes or so.

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Sep 05, 2011 Todd Russell rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, novellas

The King loves his cars :) I preferred his story "Trucks" from the Night Shift collection over Mile 81 but this is a decent Stephen King tale that fellow Constant Readers will enjoy.

Mile 81 will make you think twice of station wagons with muddy-covered windows and car doors that creak open. No spoilers but the ending was underwhelming and seemed a bit rushed. The best parts for me were King's signature characterization skills (man, he's good!) and King's cleverly scattered horror humor.

The sampl...more

4 likes · like · see review

Jun 03, 2012 Almeta rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: reviewed

Listened to this version while motoring for four hours toward the great outdoors. Very entertaining. Glad the rest-stops along the way were well populated!

2 likes · like · see review

Apr 02, 2013 Leigh rated it 3 of 5 stars

This story really deserves 3 1/2 stars, not a lonely 3.

Typically, I love everything by Stephen King. Even if the entire piece isn't great, there is still something about the story to love. In this particular short, a mysterious car pulls off the interstate and does.. mysterious things. Of course there is the token kid with a sense of adventure and the token kids who become wise beyond their years. As is usually always the case, Stephen King has nailed it again-- I don't know of any other author...more

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Mar 29, 2013 T.L. Barrett rated it 5 of 5 stars

I don't give everything by Stephen King five stars, although he is the most consistently entertaining author alive today, IMHO. Here are some of the reasons that I gave this novella the gold prize: It reminded me of his best and funnest works in his old anthologies. It has all the elements of great everyday characters, everyday objects and situations that are turned on their head and gruesome horror. Is it brilliant? No, probably not, but it was pure and delicious entertainment. Many of the char...more

1 like · like · see review

Feb 11, 2013 Jeannie Walker rated it 5 of 5 stars

Boarded up rest stops is a good place where high-school kids drink and too often get into trouble.
In Mile 81, a rest stop that has been closed for a long time is where ten-year-old, Pete Simmons, goes when he knows his older brother is looking for him. Pete likes playing at the boarded up rest stop. (As a young kid, I often played paratroopers bombing my siblings with mud balls from the high bar ditches.) Be that as it may, back to my review: Pete finds a bottle of vodka in the boarded up hambur...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Robert Beveridge rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: ebook, finished, owned-and-still-own

Stephen King, Mile 81 (Simon and Schuster, 2011)

Stephen King is well-known for logorrhea, and it's been warranted since about the unexpurgated edition of The Stand. Which is not to say those thousand-page doorstops are not worth reading; they are, and most of them are very good. But it has always been the case, and I suspect it always will be, that King does his best work in the realm of the short story. “Grey Matter” and “The Ballad of the Flexible Bullet” and “Blind Willie” and “Survivor Type”...more

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Sep 27, 2012 Andrew Miller rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

It's Stephen King so it's obviously good. The only question is how good. The cast of characters is perhaps a bit larger than strictly necessary and there are a few moments that feel like it's trying too hard to be modern but that's not really so bad. There is one bit that feels like an add for AT&T and that is nigh unforgivable. Subtle product placement may enhance the experience in movies and television but not here. You've got a limited number of words in which to tell a story. I don't wan...more

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Jun 27, 2012 Maxine McLister rated it 3 of 5 stars

The thing about Stephen King, for me, is, I tend to prefer the movies made from his books more than the books themselves and it's usually his non-horror stuff that I like the most. One of my favourite all-time movies is Stand By Me based on one of his short stories called, I think, The Body. My favourite book by him is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Yes, there's a little horror but mostly it's about a little girl who loves baseball and, when she becomes lost in the woods, it is this love which h...more The thing about Stephen King, for me, is, I tend to prefer the movies made from his books more than the books themselves and it's usually his non-horror stuff that I like the most. One of my favourite all-time movies is Stand By Me based on one of his short stories called, I think, The Body. My favourite book by him is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. Yes, there's a little horror but mostly it's about a little girl who loves baseball and, when she becomes lost in the woods, it is this love which helps her survive.

So what, you may be asking, has any of this got to do with Mile 81. Well, the one thing I think Mr King does better than just about any other author is draw real three-dimensional kids. His kids are not those smug, overly intelligent, glib and witty kids you find so often in literature. No, his kids are real - they are the kids most of us were when our parents weren't looking. They experiment with smoking and drinking, do really dangerous and dumb things, and swear like little troopers. Marines could learn a thing or two about language from these kids. And I love them!

When Peter Simmon's older brother tells him he is too young to hang out with him and his friends and do dumb and dangerous thing on their bikes, he decides he will show them and go do something equally dumb and perhaps even more dangerous. He decides he will explore an abandoned rest stop at, of course, Mile 81. I was completely drawn into little Pete's adventure.

However, about half way through this fairly short novella, Pete kind of leaves the story for a while and the horror begins. This part of the book is rather reminiscent of Christine (again, loved the movie not so much the book) and I didn't find this as engrossing until near the end when Pete reenters the story.

Don't get me wrong, King is one heck of a writer. The trouble, at least for me, is that his horror tends to be so visual, it just doesn't work on the page as well as it does on the big screen. But, like I said, I love his kids and Peter is one of his best. So read it for the well-drawn characters or read it for the horror, there's a little bit here for everyone.
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May 25, 2012 Peter Boysen rated it 3 of 5 stars

The novella is an underutilized genre, in my opinion. While the epic of Harry Potter might indeed require seven large doorstop-sized volumes to tell in full, and while Stephen King's Insomnia might well be worth reading a text the size of Anna Karenina, the discipline of telling a story that is too long to be considered "short," yet does not require even 100 pages, is fading from American letters.

The temptation to stretch a story past its necessary, or even desirable, length is not a new one. Co...more The novella is an underutilized genre, in my opinion. While the epic of Harry Potter might indeed require seven large doorstop-sized volumes to tell in full, and while Stephen King's Insomnia might well be worth reading a text the size of Anna Karenina, the discipline of telling a story that is too long to be considered "short," yet does not require even 100 pages, is fading from American letters.

The temptation to stretch a story past its necessary, or even desirable, length is not a new one. Consider The Scarlet Letter, for example. You could tell that story in perhaps 50 pages, even with a length interlude in the forest. It is Hawthorne's desire to drive his point into you with a rivet gun that stretches that story well over 200 pages. The introduction, The Custom-House, is over 30 pages on its own -- and most readers just jump right over it and go to the story.

In other words, it is important to let stories be stories. And this is where the ebook format may help writers. Publishers may not want to front the cost of an 80-page release. It doesn't really look like a novel, and so readers may walk past it to something that looks better, just because it's longer.

But did stretching the economical "Heart of Darkness" into that marathon "Apocalypse Now" improve the story that much? Granted, the classic Duvall line didn't appear in Conrad's novel, but then again there was no napalm in the days of colonial Africa.

The novella in ebook form goes right to your e-reader, or to your computer screen, without the bias of looking smaller than its peers in the ranks of the novel.

Which brings us to this story. Young Pete Simmons, age 10, is spending the day in the care of his older brother, but his brother wants to go play with his friends at the town gravel pit, and Pete is just too "little" to be cool enough to hang out with the 13-year-olds. So, he tells Pete to entertain himself for a couple of hours and goes off.

Pete doesn't go home and play his XBox all afternoon, though. Instead, he heads off to get into the type of adventure that will impress his brother, and he heads down to the abandoned rest stop at Mile 81 of Interstate 95 in Maine. Boarded up, what had been a Burger King is now rife with stained mattresses, cigarette butts, soda and beer bottles, and the other detritus of bored teenagers looking for some thrills. He tries some hits off a bottle of vodka that he finds, and soon he is fast asleep on one of the filthy mattresses.

Meanwhile, a strange station wagon pulls up to the rest stop, and the driver door opens. No one, however, gets out. The grown-ups who try to solve the mystery of this station wagon pay the price for being a Good Samaritan and seeing if the station wagon's owner needs help -- to tell you anything else would spoil it.

This would have been a great story to let my son read. He's 12, likes scary stories, and this would be a great introduction to Stephen King. I'm normally not on the side of those who protect kids from content, though, but the language that Pete has in his internal monologue may be in my son's as well, but it's not something for a father and son to share -- at least for a few more years.

As far as a tale told in the true Brothers Grimm tradition, though, the station wagon stands along side the Gingerbread Man and the Big Bad Wolf in the pantheon of childhood villains. The way that the station wagon's owners succeed in bringing horror to this sunny Maine day is an indictment on the ways that too many adults turn off their minds when they forget what being a child is like. So while the story seems to warn against being a Good Samaritan, the true lesson is that it is never a good idea to stop, at least completely, seeing the world like a child does.
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May 12, 2012 D.g. Gass rated it 2 of 5 stars

First, one has to keep in mind that this is a short story and not a complete novel. If you’re new to the author or haven’t read much of King’s writings, then you’ll probably enjoy it. The writing style is classic Stephen King, with the reader not knowing what the monster is until the very end.

That being said, as much as I love Stephen King, even his short stories, I wasn’t exactly wow’d by this story. Call it the curse of familiarity. Read any author enough and you’re bound to find at least one...more

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May 05, 2012 Emily rated it 1 of 5 stars

This was crap. Seriously. Crap. It was actually embarrassing to read. I've read a long, long list of SK books, and found something good in all of them. This had me wishing he had actually retired. Let's start with the names. Every character had a made-up sounding name. Or at least one that didn't make sense for the story being set in the present day. I mean seriously, it's 2011 and the kids are Pete and George? Then there's the cringe-worthy self-referencing. Pete has American Vampire in his bag...more

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Mar 10, 2012 Bridget rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: reviewed

Mile 81 is a short e-book (a novella, if you will) released by Stephen King in September 2011. It was released only as an e-book, so I had no idea how I’d ever be able to read it—but then a coworker let me borrow her Kindle at the end of September at an overnight staff function and I got to read it and it was awesome.

Fast-forward five months, and I still hadn’t written about it. By that point, I figured that I wouldn’t be able to remember enough of it to review it, so I figured I’d just forget a...more Mile 81 is a short e-book (a novella, if you will) released by Stephen King in September 2011. It was released only as an e-book, so I had no idea how I’d ever be able to read it—but then a coworker let me borrow her Kindle at the end of September at an overnight staff function and I got to read it and it was awesome.

Fast-forward five months, and I still hadn’t written about it. By that point, I figured that I wouldn’t be able to remember enough of it to review it, so I figured I’d just forget about it. But then, I got my shiny new iPhone, with its awesome app, iBooks, and I was able to download it on my phone! I was able to read it again, and this time I’m actually going to write a review!

When ten-year-old Pete Simmons is left behind by his older brother, George, on a boring, overcast day during spring vacation, he decides to go investigate the abandoned Mile 81 rest stop near his house. Having heard tales of Really Big Kids going there to do coke, drink, and “suck face” with their girlfriends, Pete can’t wait to explore—and prove to George and his friends (who call themselves the “Rip-Ass Raiders”) that he isn’t just a little kid.

Upon getting to the rest stop, Pete finds a half full bottle of vodka and takes a few nips—you know, so he can give George and the Rip-Ass Raiders an accurate report—promptly overwhelming his ten-year-old body. Eventually, he nods off on an old mattress inside the rest stop building.

After Pete falls asleep, a nondescript station wagon makes its way into the rest stop, barreling through the orange barriers blocking its way. Then, its driver’s side door opens…but no one gets out. The entire car—including the windshield and even the interior—is covered with mud, obscuring the make and model; it has no license plates. The open door seems almost to beckon.

What is the secret of this mysterious car? Doug Clayton, an insurance man from Bangor, will soon find out. So will Julianne Vernon, the entire Lussier family, and Maine State Trooper Jimmy Golding. Eventually, Pete Simmons will wake up to a horror he could never have imagined. But perhaps he, unlike the others, will be able to stop it.

Normally, when it comes to Stephen King, I generally prefer his huge, chunky books, like It and The Stand. While I like his short stories, they just haven’t always been the easiest things for me to get into—although I think part of the problem is that I get too into them, and feel let down when the story ends before it really seems to begin. But Mile 81 seemed like just the right length. It probably only took me about two hours cumulatively to get through (less the first time), but it was a simple plot that wrapped up quite nicely, in my opinion.

It’s too long to be a short story and too short to be a novel, so I can’t really compare it to much else of King’s work that I’ve read…the only thing I can think to compare it to is The Mist (a novella King wrote that was first published in a horror anthology called Dark Forces in 1980), which I read a few years ago and enjoyed, but Mile 81 was tons better, in my opinion. I kind of felt that The Mist could probably have been longer than it was and better fleshed out—perhaps a two-part book with part one being in the grocery store and part two beyond—because it was a pretty complex story. Mile 81 was simple: evil car. Sound familiar? I wonder what it is with Stephen King and evil cars…

Anyway, if you’re looking for a quick read and you do have an e-reader (or an iPhone) and are willing to spend the $2.99 for a great story, you should download this one. King fans will immediately recognize (and love) his unique narrative voice and well-crafted characters. Enjoy!(less)

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Dec 30, 2011 Clint rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2011

I got back into Stephen King after a break of nearly 15 years when I read Under the Dome earlier this year, and I've had a lot of fun catching back up with him, but not so much with this one. It's not even a novella, just a longish short story. I like the set up, a mysterious car comes out of nowhere, like the Buick 8, in a way, and it basically eats the fuck out of anyone who gets too close. No explanation, it's just a muddy car that eats people, and it's parked in front of a closed-down rest a...more

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Dec 15, 2011 Spencer Seher rated it 1 of 5 stars

I can't believe that someone who has been one the most bestselling writers in the world consistently for almost 40 years published this dreck. It is without a doubt one of the worst if not the worst novella I've ever read. I don't think he read a single word again after it was typed. It is such a dumb story, not just poorly written. Sometimes, Mr. King, and this is coming from a rabid fan, a story should just be tossed in the recycle bin, and you should simply consider it at the very least an ex...more

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Nov 13, 2011 My Inner Shelf rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: _vo, _nouvelles, contemporains, fantastique

Stephen King est un auteur dans le vent, il joue le jeu du numérique et sa dernière nouvelle est exclusivement disponible au format numérique. Outil promotionnel aussi puisqu’il propose le premier chapitre de son roman à venir dans les semaines/mois qui viennent : 11/22/63.

Petit nouvelle bien sympathique, qu’on lit vite, qu’on oublie vite. Un Stephen King sera toujours, au pire des cas, sympathique. Pete Simmons, un jeune garçon négligé par son frère aîné qui préfère traîner avec des copains de...more

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Nov 10, 2011 David rated it 4 of 5 stars

My last outing with Mr King was Under the Dome (which in my view I termed Under the Done) which had a great premise, but as is so often the case with his books now, needed a serious edit, not only for length but for the points of view and pacing presented in the book. My particular issue was a certain point of view of a psychic pooch - Really Mr King??!

Putting clairvoyant canines aside and due to my interest in reading the upcoming 11.22.63, I thought reading Mile 81 (recommended by a fellow Goo...more

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Oct 26, 2011 Tim rated it 5 of 5 stars

I got this one on my Kindle when it was released. This story reminds of "Night Shifts", which was a collection of short stories of Kings. This one would have fit right in there. It is an eerie story of about a horrific creature from who knows where that has the appearance of an American made station wagon. I suspect one day you may see this as a movie but personally I think it would be best if it remained a short story. This one would seem a bit hokey in movie form to me, but it works well as a...more

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Oct 24, 2011 Matt R. rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Mile 81" is classic King in that an "everyday" object becomes the focus of horror, blood, and mayhem, and I appreciated that in this case it was a muddy station wagon... seeing as how I drove such a thing for the better part of a decade. As always with King, great characters that are instantly resonant and three-dimensional, even though most of 'em don't make it through to the end.

In fact, you pretty much know how everybody's going to end up after the second passage of the tale -- in a way it w...more

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Oct 08, 2011 Craig rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: short-story, horror, fiction

I think Steven King’s short stories are often better than his novels. The Body, Everything’s Eventual and Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption are examples of what King can do in fewer than 200 pages. Mile 81 is an enjoyable but forgettable read and I don’t think I’ll ever want to reread it.

Like Christine and From a Buick 8, Mile 81 is another story about an evil car. Set at an abandon rest area off Interstate 95 in Maine the story is told from six different points of view. A mysterious s...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Edward Gordon rated it 2 of 5 stars

Mile 81 by Stephen King (Scribner, 2011), is simply ridiculous. Twice I stopped reading it to read a self-published debut horror novel by an unknown author.

It’s a long short story, more of a novella really, that details the events surrounding an abandon rest stop along I-95 at mile marker eighty-one. It begins with a ten-year-old boy who finds a bottle of Vodka therein, and we are treated to his thoughts in detail as he looks at pictures of naked women. Eventually he falls asleep and the story...more

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Sep 21, 2011 Rich Stoehr rated it 4 of 5 stars

"Mile 81" is a short story that reads very much like the "classic" King of the years of Night Shift or Skeleton Crew - and that comes with both good points and bad.

"Mile 81" is a reminder of King's mastery of the art of the setup. He takes an ordinary thing - say, for example, a mud-caked station wagon rolling to a stop just outside an abandoned rest area, it's driver door popping open just a bit - and turns it into something suspenseful, with that weird vibe that only King can get quite right....more

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Sep 18, 2011 Tammy Walton Grant rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: kindle-or-ebook, stephen-king, suspense-horror, 2011-september

You can debate for years about Stephen King's place in modern literature but you have to hand it to the man -- he's prolific as hell and has about the most distinctive voice ever heard in fiction. Whether you love him or hate him, you'll recognize his writing by about three paragraphs into whatever it is you're reading.

I'm one of the folks King calls his "Constant Readers" -- we've been together since I was a kid. I saw 'Salems Lot on tv in the 70s and immediately ran out and bought the book. I'...more

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Sep 17, 2011 Larry Hoffer rated it 3 of 5 stars

Given Stephen King's penchant for 1000+-page novels, it was terrific to have a short story from him instead. Mile 81 is a short story released exclusively in e-book form, and it marks a return to the King of yesteryear, where "regular" people find themselves confronted with a completely horrifying situation.

At Mile 81 on the Maine Turnpike is a boarded-up rest stop. One day, young Pete Simmons goes exploring there, to prove to his older brother and his friends that he's just as capable of being...more

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Sep 16, 2011 Lisa rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: horror, short-story

Stephen King rehashes his penchant for demented vehicles and heroic children in Mile 81, a short story published exclusively for Amazon Kindle. There was very little new offered in this tale of a ghost car that has a taste for human flesh, nothing that hasn't been done before, and much better, by Mr. King.

In stories such as The Body and The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the theme of the loss of innocence was presented within the framework of full and richly drawn characters, kids whose journey bega...more

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About Stephen King

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family...more Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine in 1947, the second son of Donald and Nellie Ruth Pillsbury King. After his parents separated when Stephen was a toddler, he and his older brother, David, were raised by his mother. Parts of his childhood were spent in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father's family was at the time, and in Stratford, Connecticut. When Stephen was eleven, his mother brought her children back to Durham, Maine, for good. Her parents, Guy and Nellie Pillsbury, had become incapacitated with old age, and Ruth King was persuaded by her sisters to take over the physical care of the elderly couple. Other family members provided a small house in Durham and financial support. After Stephen's grandparents passed away, Mrs. King found work in the kitchens of Pineland, a nearby residential facility for the mentally challenged.

Stephen attended the grammar school in Durham and then Lisbon Falls High School, graduating in 1966. From his sophomore year at the University of Maine at Orono, he wrote a weekly column for the school newspaper, THE MAINE CAMPUS. He was also active in student politics, serving as a member of the Student Senate. He came to support the anti-war movement on the Orono campus, arriving at his stance from a conservative view that the war in Vietnam was unconstitutional. He graduated from the University of Maine at Orono in 1970, with a B.A. in English and qualified to teach on the high school level. A draft board examination immediately post-graduation found him 4-F on grounds of high blood pressure, limited vision, flat feet, and punctured eardrums.

He and Tabitha Spruce married in January of 1971. He met Tabitha in the stacks of the Fogler Library at the University of Maine at Orono, where they both worked as students. As Stephen was unable to find placement as a teacher immediately, the Kings lived on his earnings as a laborer at an industrial laundry, and her student loan and savings, with an occasional boost from a short story sale to men's magazines.

Stephen made his first professional short story sale ("The Glass Floor") to Startling Mystery Stories in 1967. Throughout the early years of his marriage, he continued to sell stories to men's magazines. Many of these were later gathered into the Night Shift collection or appeared in other anthologies.

In the fall of 1971, Stephen began teaching high school English classes at Hampden Academy, the public high school in Hampden, Maine. Writing in the evenings and on the weekends, he continued to produce short stories and to work on novels.(less)

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