All through college I loved writing short stories. But because I am a cad, when I found out how unprofitable the medium was I switched to blogging and TV scripts. Turns out there's still one way to market a short story: Pack it with references. Not thought-out T.S. Eliot ones, but marginal-pop-culture ones. Your story doesn't have to be good if it's about Vampire Weekend, the Tipping Point and Twitter.
I first noticed this trick last month in a terrible short story in the New Yorker, "Raj, Bohemian." Gripped by recognizable, almost-trendy concepts (the protagonist watches pre-release bootleg movies, gets to hot clubs before "a single mention on a blog" fills it with guys in stripeys, and the whole story revolves around his offense at being targeted by stealth marketers as an "early adopter") I read the whole thing, even as the style devolved into undergrad tripe that, without all the forced relevance, could never have made it into the New Yorker.
Today I saw the same trick in a story promoted on Boing Boing. Hyperbolic sci-fi author Cory Doctorow said the piece ("Mallory" by Leonard Richardson) "reads like the first three paragraphs of Snow Crash, but extended, remixed, and oh, so sweetly." I know, that blurb should have driven me away, but my editor Nick Denton is a fan of cyberpunk so I checked whether it was good enough for Gawker.
It's bad enough for Gawker. I see why Doctorow loved it: while the style was even more cloying than his (which admittedly can be said of all of cyberpunk and its descendant genres), it uses literally ten times the insider references that the Internet's in crowd loves to read. Richardson phrase-drops "NSA data miners," "glitch metal," the habit of pretending to read a friend's blog, and Katamari Damacy all in the first scene. He also writes some of the worst sentences I've seen since freshman year: "Vijay was neither ready nor un-." "He dropped the fake cell phone like a piece of bread he'd just discovered was moldy." "'Stop being such a drama queen,' said Keith. 'It makes us actual queens look bad.'"
