I made excellent progress on the new story last night. This is a military science fiction. Very short. I’m aiming for 4500 words or fewer. I’m at around 2400 and just hitting the central event. This feels different for me. It’s a lot less organic than what I normally write, but the characters feel right for the story.

My goal has been to keep the story simple. The motivations should be clear, the world and how it works should be clear, and the overall character arcs should be clear as well. It should be as simple as a cure song, and hopefully just as enjoyable.

I’m also writing it relatively fast. The prose is a bit sparser than what I normally write, but it’s OK, because that seems to be what the specific magazine I’m writing for likes. It’ll be nice to see this one published.

I did a little more work on the site. I’m still not too terribly happy with it yet. I did at least manage to add links to my fellow CW graduates. I also seem to have lost my CW entrance submissions and biography, which is a bit of a shame. I’m hoping they’re on my older computer.

I think something in my internal story engine has clicked. It’s like a particular gear was out of place and mucking up the machine, because recently the story ideas I’ve been developing are far more complete. They actually have a beginning, middle, and end. What I thought was that I didn’t know how to do short story endings, but what I’ve learned is that I didn’t know how to do short story middles. The middle was killing me.

After reading a huge list of other short works and trying my best to sort of reverse engineer them, I’ve come to the conclusion that I write a particular type of story best. Knowing that will now let me leverage writing those type of stories to keep sales up and continue learning to write other types of stories. I mean, I’m hoping it will help me to keep sales up.