OK, so I’m stealing my heading selections from Elizabeth Bear. Well, not her titles exactly, but the concept of posting sections of lyrics from songs. However, I’m picking obscure songs from obscure bands, which might make me elite or just a huge nerd. Yeah, huge nerd is what I thought as well.

I worked a little on the Edgar Allen Poe vs the Murloc story last night. The voice in this one is tricky, so it’s taking a little longer just to get words down on paper. I’ll have to keep it a short one just for that reason. I’m real close to having another story out to market. Work has been stressing me out lately, because of course I’ve been given very little time to do a project that they changed three or four times, and now they want it delivered to QA. However, it ain’t even working yet. I’m getting close to finishing, but just don’t have the old drive to work all night that I used to have. I’m just getting too old for that crap.

I must have fixed some programming in my head. I had a real hard time there for a while where all I could come up for story ideas were subjects and events that would take way longer than a short story to tell. I think I might have managed to get my brain wrapped around the 2-4k story length. I wrote a 1500 word one Saturday night and now I’m working on one that will likely come in around 3k, and I have a hard science fiction in the notes that will likely come in around 4-5k. This is a nice place to be.

I think I’ve got that sized plotting down to something pretty simple. One event. Of course, you have to sort of understand what the event is. And it can be somewhat ambiguous as to what you should explore when exploring the one event, but it’s not exactly a science like sword making or anything. You just have to fiddle around with it until it works right.

Like my Edgar Allen Poe vs the Murloc is basically about a character finding the beach of lost items, seeing his sister’s beloved comb, and having to battle a fish dude who is going through some initiation to get it from the top of a steep cliff wall [that actually sounds like a lot of events, but the big event idea for me was that some guy on the beach would find a comb and need to battle for it]. The hard science fiction one is even easier–a team of astronauts/scientists must deal with debris from a passing meteoroid. A lot can come from these events, but this is the way I’ve started thinking of short fiction. It’s one major event to explore. My character still wants something, still works to pursue something, and still runs into obstacles, but they normally center on this event.

Maybe when I’ve put a little more thought into it, and developed and sold a few stories with this way of thinking about story, I’ll expand on it. I’m just glad I have some clearer direction now.

I feel like I’m in a good place. I could probably do a story a week or more. I think now I just need to learn to balance my writing time with my reading time. I listen to a lot of stories on podcasts, but I don’t think it’s quite the same as seeing words on paper. I think if you’re a writer you need to see words written on paper by people who know what they are doing as often as possible.

Well, I don’t want to go to work, but pretty much have to. I’ll try to post here more often. I’ll try to keep the topics focused on the fiction as much as possible.

Fiction excerpt from latest WIP:

In those final days when my sister Balentine lay pale in her emerald bedding, coughing out the last of her young life in droplets of blood on lace kerchiefs, and relatives from as far away as the Carolinas made the journey by rail to see her off, I found myself so distracted I wandered to a beach yet unexplored, even in the times of my most curious youth.