What to do with a pile of short stories?

I have written a LOT of short stories over the years, mainly for competitions, and recently I began to plan next steps for this enormous body of work.

My decision?

Compile and publish them!

This will take a little time. I wrote most of them under tight deadlines, so they will need to be revisited. But I'm excited about this new challenge, and I am using my weekly writing group as a venue to make progress with edits.

Most of what I write ends up being suitable for middle grade or young adult readers (whether I like it or not), so I will be sticking to my usual target audience.

I will write a little more about each of my stories over the next few weeks, but for now, here is an overview. So far, I have identified four categories of stories.

GHOST or HORROR

I know, right? Not really my thing, but contest organizers just keep throwing this at me. Of the five stories in this category so far, two are straight up ghost tales, one has a surprise zombie, one has a mysterious antagonist that may or may not be dead, and the last explores the horrors that humans are capable of inflicting on each other.

METAL HEALTH

A surprising number of my stories explore mental health themes. Currently, I have seven stories that I have grouped into this category that explore the difficulties of being different, coping with the loss of loved ones, and facing your fears.

ACTION and ADVENTURE

I have eight stories in this category, and while I don't really consider myself a huge fan of the genre, these are weirdly enough the stories that I tend to best with in contests. Most explore different dystopian futures (or perhaps they're more reflective of present day?), but two of them explore fictional versions of our own world's past. The easiest grouping to tweak and prepare, I might work on this collection first.

FANTASY

I very much consider fantasy to be 'my' genre. Another seven stories currently fall into this category, and my, are they weird (think Terry Pratchett meets Douglas Adams). While these stories are most indicative of my tastes, they're going to be the hardest ones to weave into a collection that makes sense, but I look forward to the challenge.