Iiiiii don’t know if anyone can answer this, but it’s worth a try.
Think of your favorite of my settings.
Now, is there a story you can remember as “this, this is a good intro to [setting]?”
This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/971913.html. You can comment here or there.
What was said on the dreamwidth thread. It’s hard to stuff a world into a short story. My two favorites of your worlds (Dragons Next Door and Aunt Family) also suffer a shortage of beginning-middle-end stories that provide a useful introduction and don’t drop the (new) reader at a cliffhanger with a maybe-someday followup. That said … in Aunts, the storylet with everyone bringing presents for the new baby presents a bunch of aspects of the family nicely, but may be throwing too many characters around for a new reader, and IIRC doesn’t say anything directly about magic. The thread with Eva and Robbie offers multi-method Aunt problem solving and does touch on magic, but the family aspects aren’t as directly addressed. The intervention with Aunt Beatrix presents some family and some magic, but not really the Aunt or the extent of the intergenerational issues. The piece that are leaping to mind for Dragons Next Door as sufficiently complete stories to offer a new reader are the one with Aud and the giraffe skeleton at the museum, and the one with the exterminator and the tinies with the lease, but neither has the Smiths, and the latter doesn’t have any of Aud/Sage/Jin/Junie/[baby brother]. Science! is a bunch of mostly stand-alone shorts with some shared background that doesn’t matter for most of them. Space Accountant will either become a single finished story or not. Stranded has lots of neat vignettes but nothing that’s actually a complete plot comes to mind. Likewise Planners and Unicorn/Factory. Fairy Town is all over the place, so while the first piece you wrote there, about crossing the park, might work for an world intro, I’m not sure it’d actually be useful for introducing any other specific story, and the other finished piece I can think of there is the one with Mr. Ting’s shop, which somehow never grabbed me. Edally has a novel, woot!