26 posts tagged “short stories”

I wrote two short stories today: Prada & The Giant Sloth, and Dentophilia.

That's about 9000 words of fiction. Woah.

It might take me forever to come up with a workable short story plot, but once I have one, I use it.

Today I wrote Panzersloth, based on an outline developed by Matthew. It's so nice knowing that once I have a story, I will sit down and write the little bugger.

I churned out this in an afernoon, just like I did OCR. Of course, OCR was 7500 words, so it's slightly more impressive.

All I need is a workable plot for a novel and I can get one done in a month.

If only.

I got an email today, telling me that I can pick up my copy of Wuthering Heights on Monday. I have to read it for Tuesday.

SparkNotes, here I come.

In fan-bloody-tastic news, I'm collaborating on a short story! This is something I've wanted to do for a while now. This week, a friend from the Permuted Press forums suggested we work together on a short story for the Giant Creatures anthology. He has a concept, I have time to write. We're in the process of bouncing ideas off of each other right now, and so far it's looking good. If it turns out as intended, it'll probably be the best things I've worked on.

At first I was a little nervous about working with someone who's a better writer than me, but the brainstorming process has been going so well that I'm actually pretty sure that the story we're working on will turn out better than my regular stories.

Also, I'm going to have to start work on the new Angler soon. The meeting for the next issue will be either Monday or Friday of next week. I'll most likely be interviewing the boss of Permuted for the lit-related articles they want me to do, and I might have to do another article on an Anglophone country. I hope I don't, to be honest. I've already run out of Anglophone friends, and I don't like writing about countries that I've never visited.

Actually, I know a load of Yanks, but I think it's a bit silly to write an article about America. The less obvious Anglophone countries are a lot more interesting, and will have much more on offer that the audience won't already know.

Also, went on a big reading spree this weekend. It was mostly to avoid reading Huckleberry Finn (it's probably fantastic but the language annoys the hell out of me). So, I started and finished both Breakfast of Champions and Every Sigh, The End.

Next time I'm procrastinating, I'll probably type some reviews up. This will probably happen later on tonight, knowing myself.

This year, I want to write at least one short story every month.

I've already got one done for January, which I wrote in one day. If I have one good day a month, it'll work out. If I have less than one good day a month... then I just need to try harder, don't I?

In my overview post which will remain at the top of my Vox for the whole of 2008, I want to have at least 12 short stories listed as written by the time 2009 rolls around. I'll make an exception for November, seeing as that's NaNo month, but other than that, it'll be one short a month. Hopefully more, but we'll just see how this goes.

I really really do.

Today I began and finished my first attempt at a robot story, Of Course Reginald. See, I even named it! And the name is really cool, I think. It refers to multiple things in the story. Whee.

First it was just ten words shy of the maximum word count of 7500, but I managed to shave 500 off when I did my edits. I've posted it to the anthology-specific PP crit board. The anthology's editor has downloaded it, by the looks of things, so I should get the vital feedback soon enough.

7500 words in one day. A complete story. If I kept this up for a little over a week, I'd have a NaNoWriMo.

Today I got just over 4000 new words on the as yet untitled SciFi piece about teeth.

I've never done SciFi before, so I'm really not sure if this is any good. Still, it's just fluff, really, so it doesn't matter either way. I can't do hard SciFi - when it comes to nanotech and all that jazz, I simply can't brain.

I'm also gradually gearing up for NaNoWriMo. I don't think trying last year's novel again is a good idea - I'm more likely to get bogged down. If I manage to find time for some serious worldbuilding between now and November, I might go with a steampunk thing I've been thinking about.

Also, this journal is almost a year old! *pets journal*

Recently I've been worrying about my gums. They were irritated and just didn't feel right. I am, however, perfectly capable of convincing myself that there's something wrong when all is fine, so I went down to the doctor's for him to have a look before I went and bothered the dentist.

Now, my GP is a bit shit, to be honest. He doesn't take people seriously and he's never even lived in the same country as 'tact'. So, he took one glance at my gums and said that I would start losing teeth soon if I didn't get something done.

I immediately called the dentist. A week and one appointment later, he tells me there's nothing wrong with my gums - they're just a bit sore. He gave me a special tooth paste and told me to come back in six months. Apparently my wisdom teeth are about to come through and they could give me some bother.

This just reinforced my violent dislike for my GP. I spent a week wondering if I would need false teeth at the age of 20 because he's such a callous bastard, even though my teeth are in good condition, even if they're not glaringly white.

And so I'm now currently writing a story about teeth. It's almost disgustingly optimistic, as my work tends to be. I'm not cut out to be a horror writer - my work is too damn happy.

I've also been busy sorting my books out for the coming semester. I ordered through my student association, but something's gone wrong and now I don't have books for half my subjects. Oh, I have a lot of books - but they're all for my two Lit subjects. I have no books for Philology or Linguistics.

Also, I heard that I am one of only two people in the whole of Leiden taking American Lit as an extra subject. This is a subject that is available to all of the thousands of students... and there's a grand total of two taking it.

I'm only taking it because I like Lit and I don't want to do the teacher training course till next year, but STILL. Damn.

Still, this means that there will be more third year students in the work group for me to meet, which I consider a good thing.

Today, in a valiant bout of procrastination, I wrote a short story. Right now two themes are dominating my thoughts: my resits next week and the fact that I'm single and I want to do something about it.

Deciding that the best way to get my thoughts away from the resits is to focus on the being single thing, I wrote a short story of about three and a half thousand words, inspired by the type of male attention I've been getting lately. Because, as is always the case, it's only unwelcome attention.

Still, it was highly enjoyable to take the piss out of myself and the people who've hit on me who really should know better. Also, now the finished short story count is up to 18. Pretty soon I'm going to devote a whole day to rewrites, then I'm going to find markets for them all and send them out.

Less than 12 hours after sending it off, I got The Cape back from Podcastle. It was a rejection: the editor who reviewed it wasn't able to really engage with it because too much of the action was in the flashbacks.

This is, without a doubt, the most constructive criticism I've ever got. It's kickass.

I'm going to try to restructure it, so that it's in (roughly) chronological order, polish it up and send it off to Pseudopod, because it does contain elements of horror. Or did I already send it there? I'll have to check. My mind is like a sieve.

So, first of all, the Question of the Day. I don't resemble any celebrity, so far as I know. I actually had a conversation about how unique-looking my face is the other day, and we came to the conclusion that it was indeed unique-looking. It was quite a short conversation.

The fun part of having my face is that I'm easy to remember. The bad part is that I look bad in 2-D, making photo's generally cringeworthy.

Lots of stuff has been going on recently. I tried to include writing, but it didn't work. More on why later.

Now, I've been playing a hell of a lot of Pokémon (I'm so uncool that I'm just really, really uncool), so most of my time went into that. I've also been hanging out with people and talking on the phone a lot. One phone conversation was with my cousin James, who is apparently going to be in Amsterdam next week. Luckily I haven't got much going on right now, so I'm going to hop on the train and go see him. Christ, it's been four years since I visited him over in England. Time sure does fly.

One other particularly memorable phone conversation was with Leontine last night. Most of it was about Lesbian Boot Camp.

I'm not going to say anything else about that, because frankly, any details could only detract from that statement.

I spent a fair amount of time at my parents' place back in the south. Now, my dad's computer is awful, so I only get on there to check my email and some blogs. I suppose I could have done some writing while there, but my dad is practically addicted to the internet, so he'd probably want to get back on the computer while I'm in the middle of some awesome scene or the other. I've tried using the old-fashioned pen and paper, but it just doesn't work for me. It reminds me of the dreadful thing I wrote when I was eleven - over four hundred pages of drivel about werewolves. The only good thing about that thing was the ending: And then she got shot and she died, the end.

That's paraphrased, because the original was in Dutch. But you get the idea.

Last night I got home and I sat behind my computer, and after having caught up with teh_mlijn and the adventures he had in Brittanny, I thought, fuck it, I'm going to work on that novel I tried to do for NaNo last year.

Is that the first time I've used an expletive on this blog? Who cares. It's what I thought. I swear way too much in my head anyway.

And I got about a page done, and then it got way too personal and I exited without saving. It's so frustrating - I love the premise. It mixes the Shaver mystery (deros and teros and underground D-beams making people depraved) with Alice in Wonderland and would probably make me feel a hell of a lot better about the thing that almost killed my mum eight years back. It's still awkward, though. Especially what has to be the opening scene.

No, I'm going to be sticking with short stories till November. I like them a hell of a lot more than I like novels, and not just because you can get them done in a day. Although it's great to get drawn in to the world the writer creates and then to live there for a week, short stories just come in, kick you in the arse and then leave without even saying goodbye. It's quick and sweet, short and dirty, lots of other set phrases to do with being not very long. Right now, short is what I'm in to. Being in something long can be good, but when you've had that for a long time, you want a change of pace, right?

Also, I'm really bloody impatient. I'm currently reading Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub. Now, I like the story a hell of a lot so far, but I want something big to happen. Okay, so something big did just happen, technically speaking, but I want something else! I want to know more about that and that person - the one whose exposition wasn't long enough.

I just finished reading The Colorado Kid by Stephen King. Novella. Shorter and to the point, and infinitely more satisfying, if you look at the average amount of satisfaction per page. And this for a novella that asks a lot of questions and gives hardly any answers.

Right, this entry has gone to celebrities I look like, to the relative merits of novels, novellas and short stories. And I think the progression sort of made sense. It's best to stop when you're ahead.