Well, this is a heartbreaker.

Sniplits.com, owned and operated by Anne Stuessy, is unfortunately closing shop December 15th. That kind of sucks.

I sold one of my only comedy short stories, a fantasy yarn called “One Night at Ollie’s Stump”, to Anne years and years ago. She adapted it into audio and placed it on a site where, I learned, listeners would be able to download it for a very reasonable price — $.88 at the time, less than an iTunes song download, for far more content.

That little story had some significance because I wrote it after coming out of a long bout of some things I’m not going to bring up in a public blog. Maybe someday I will.

Anyway, it was the first short fiction I’d written in a while, and I think its brevity appealed to me, and Anne’s concept appealed to me even more. She’d be giving royalties to authors if their work sold well enough through her site. That was huge. That was unexpected.

But what really stuck with me was she answered all my questions about the adaptation (which ended up being professionally narrated). She did this over the phone. She took her time to do that. I’ve dealt with so many touch-me-not editors in short fiction that her patience and humility struck me as refreshing.

And now, sadly, Sniplits is going to join the ranks of other fiction markets I’ve seen close their doors in the last few years. I hate seeing this kind of thing happen.

On the upside, Anne hints that the work might be moved to a prominent audio fiction site, so we’ll have to see how that plays out. Here’s hoping for the best for a quality editor and the stories she helped bring to the light of day.

Stay tuned.