I spent a good deal of time in my youth (read: the years leading up to these past few) writing. I've already written a long piece on my writerly history (here) so I won't recap it now.
Suffice it to say, I've fallen out of practice in my (relative) old age. Job, career, family, general laziness, lack of motivation and/or discipline, whatever the reason. I used to write daily (in my early twenties). Then I would write weekly (later twenties, moving into the thirties). Then monthly (early thirties). Now I write yearly, annually, in November, for the NaNoWriMo project, something that has left me with several unfinished novels over the past few years but nothing I can hang my hat on with pride and offer up to the world and say, "Here, I did this."
In my (relative) youth, mostly in school, I wrote short stories. A lot of them. Collected on my c:\ drive (and on countless diskettes and CD backups somewhere) I have thirty of them. Most are horrible and should never be shown to anyone. Amateur practice exercises. Some are workable. Pieces I wrote for my creative writing classes.
All of them are very long. Defying the very definition of the short story.
As I got older, I realized that my propensity for long writing was better suited for novels. Short stories don't need to following the basic "beginning + middle + end" formulas, by their very nature they lend themselves to experimentation in form and style (e.g., I just read a story that was told exclusively as answers to a lengthy questionnaire, for which we could not see the questions... try than in a 300 page novel). But my natural story-telling style always gravitates to the length and forms of a novel.
Many of my short stories were, in fact, mini-novels. Lots of them were in the 8,000 - 15,000 word range. I would guess that most "published" short stories these days aim for (easily) half of that, if not less, although I've been out of the "Trying To Get Published" game for at least a decade.
For the last 10 years I've just been trying to write novels. And failing. I've started about a dozen. I've finished exactly zero. I know that this is where I belong, because when I write a novel I feel so at home. But as I've never finished one, I'm getting disillusioned with the whole writing process. There's something to be said for having a polished piece to hold onto. Back in school I knew a lot of those thirty were crap, but they were crap I was still proud of.
Therefore, I've decided to get back into the swing of things with short stories. At least for now. I've got 30 under my belt, so I know I can do it. I've got a few that I can re-visit and re-work. I've got notes for maybe a dozen others. I'll put what I come up with on these pages, mostly for my own benefit, but if travelers pass by and want to stop for a while, they (you) are welcome to read along.
This is an ongoing project. I will update the content as frequently as I can.
