So I stripped out the back end of D-dad and took a different direction. The story’s wound up at about 3,400 words, now and I think it’s pretty much in its final form. Here’s a not-so-secret secret. Writing a 10,000 word story doesn’t take much longer than writing a 3,000 word story. For me, anyway. […]
Read More ...Category Archives: Short Stories
Another Draft 1 Bites the Dust
I finished the first draft D-Dad, the short story I mentioned yesterday. It registers now at 3200 words, and probably needs to be a touch shorter–the back end is a bit loose. But overall, I’m happy with it. The idea came as a response to a classic story I listened to while at the gym […]
Read More ...Novels, Jealousy, and a New Short
The best thing about having completed and shipped a novel some place, in my semi-humble opinion, is that it takes away the nagging desire to tinker and clears the way for other work. But the beast is off my desk now, and suddenly two days later I find myself nearing the end of a short […]
Read More ...Catching up
So, among other things, I’ve been trying to increase my reading lately. In the past month I’ve gone back and read Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, and now I’m a couple hundred pages into Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon–which, of course, means that I’ve got about 25 gazillion pages to go. I’ve also read a bunch of short […]
Read More ...Officially Back
So I completed a story this morning. At 12,500 words it’s another novelette, of course. I think I’m now pathologically incapable of telling a story under 10,000 words. (That’s wrong, of course. One of my last four has been an honest-to-goodness short story, but let’s not bring truth or data into it.) I’ve titled it […]
Read More ...Changes
My writing is changing. By this I mean both my method and my output. I started thinking about this a few weeks ago because I’m finding that I’m often uncomfortable when I sit down to write these days, and I admit I don’t like this. In the “old days” I was rarely uncomfortable. In the […]
Read More ...Daily Teds Finished
Well, the weird opening resulted in a short story that I’ve titled “Daily Teds.” It was one of those gift stories. Lisa will be working all day tomorrow, so I think I’ll challenge myself to write a story in its entirety in a day. Should be fun. Thinking about it, I’ll make this game interesting […]
Read More ...End of the String?
I managed a couple thousand words on the new/weird story this morning. I think I know what the deal is now, and expect another couple hours will finish the first draft. It’s really in a form more toward a plot treatment than an actual story right now, as I want to make sure I get […]
Read More ...It came out of nowhere…
Now I’m in deep. I just wrote myself about 500 pretty spiffy words that, quite honestly, came out of nowhere. I had planned to write something else that has been congealing in my mind for the past week or so. But when I sat down this bit just kind of wrote itself. And it’s a […]
Read More ...Trust me, I’m done. Kinda.
As these things sometimes happen, I woke up today with a nagging doubt about “Life on Mars.” So, while I claimed it was finished through draft two yesterday, it turns out I was actually lying. Sorry about that. I added a new ending, and probably another thousand words overall after doing the detailed surgery it […]
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