Dances with Fish

Wild... I was looking for this short story I have started, and as I was hunting through the files, I found one with a rather complex little SF short story outlined within. Characters, the world, everything. And I had no memory of it at all. I vaguely remember a couple things in there, but the bulk of it is brand new to me now. Wonder if that will make it easier or harder to write?

short stories

As usual, you wait long enough, one of the muses will offer up new ideas. I have two, a brand new scifi/noir story, and an older flash horror story idea that suddenly seems to re-surfaced with a new image. I do love my noir, and I really like this story idea, at least so far.

I forgot how much I like flash. I love how you write and write to get the story started, then roll your eyes and chop it all out as unessential once you finally get to the point. I love the hacking and slashing in flash, the word counting, and the ways you find of chopping any excess to meet the 1000 word limit and still tell your story. I love succinct, and nothing says succinct like a flash story.

And on the left side of the railing...

I've known for a very long time that my strengths in writing are best suited to longer works: novellas and novels. And, oddly, I seem to be able to write decent flash fiction. But shorts... I struggle with them. Part of this is personal preference. I don't like reading short stories, so why should I think I would like writing them? I don't like them for the same reason I don't particularly like songs, but prefer opera, or symphonies, or a film score. I like my moods sustained. I want to go into something and stay there. I don't want to be amused for mere minutes when I could disappear into a world for hours.

That's not to say there aren't short stories that I enjoy, and I do read shorts regularly. And yet, when I look back at the stories from, say, F&SF magazine, the first two that pop to my mind are Kate Wilhelm's "Naming the Flowers" and Adam-Troy Castro's "The Funeral March of the Marionettes." Both are novellas, not shorts. Both awed me. Both rank among the best stories I've ever read. The other one that really stands out is "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey, which was much shorter and just as fabulous, and any and every story written by M. Rikert. I would buy anything she wrote, sight unseen, because her stories are always that good. But those are about all that I remember by title and author. A handful out of.... fifteen years of diligently reading the magazine? That's not to say I didn't enjoy most of the stories I read. Because I did. F&SF consistently prints good stories. It's just that in the realm of the shorter stories, it's more difficult to find something truly inspiring.

So I write short stories infrequently, and most of them get read by maybe one person I trust, and then they get filed away in the "practice" folder. Because that's what 90% of my shorts feel like to me. Just practice sessions, experimenting with voices and tense and structure. They're useful for that. I have only three or four shorts that I really like and think would be worth working on. And the one I like best of all, I'm not ready to write. I know that. I'm missing something yet that would allow me to do it justice. And so it sits, just a title, the outline of the story, and a few experimental paragraphs, waiting.

oops

Dang it -- I did not get the garage sale contest story written. It's still sitting in my brain, but it's missing whatever spark it needs to come to fruition. I have the setting, the events, the character, but it doesn't work yet, not even enough to write a draft of. Sigh.

This is just not my year for short stories. Even my C! fiction is all novella-length.

Now I just have to write it

Ah, the garage sale story flash fiction idea came yesterday. Gee. WWII inspired, like just about everything I've written lately from DTD to C! fiction. I was wondering a couple days ago, though, why everything I happened to be reading/watching right this particularly moment was about Italy and not France. It was starting to frustrate me, but then in the middle of it, there's my garage sale. So, all things really do seem to have a purpose.

Running hot, straight, and normal

So, I've been challenged to come up with an entry for Anotherealm's "Garage Sale" flash fiction contest... and what does my mind do? Goes off on submarines. "Why, yes, those are Mark 18 electric torpedoes in the racks over there in the back of the garage... did you need one? Moat defense, perhaps?" er... maybe not.

"Hell Interrupted"

Yay! AlienSkin Magazine's June/July issue is out and my short story is appearing in their featured fantasy fiction section!

This is the only short story I've submitted this year, and it was accepted, so I'm one for one, at least! I need to write some more shorts now that the novel is mostly done.

"Hell Interrupted"

Sold a short story to AlienSkin Magazine this week! Yay! It will be appearing in their June/July 2006 issue. I love them! I particularly love seeing how they illustrate the stories they publish. My neices and nephew favorite was their cartoon for my "Faster-than-Light Man" story. They always wanted me to write more of his adventures. The fact that I killed him off never seemed to matter to them, they still wanted more stories. Too funny.

I was visiting with them this past weekend, and my sister made the mistake of mentioning that I used to do these "traps" for her. Really, it was just a choose-your-own-adventure type maze that I would draw out on paper first, then lead her through it verbally. She (and sometimes her friend too) would lie down and listen while I spun them a tale and gave them choices... It was much fun, and challenging for me, to describe as accurately and interestingly as possible the environment they had to traverse. Well, she mentioned that, and my youngest neice pounced. So, I had to make up one on the spot for her. I took her through a dank smelly cave, and she ran into a pink and cream feathered dragon-bird thingy and got eaten. And she loved it, loved being told a story she could visualize in her mind and make decisions on whether to climb the boulder or cross the cave or whatever, and, of course, I couldn't help it and got really swept up in the telling (I've been listening to too many Dana Andrews radio shows... I'm turning into dramatic unreliable narrator girl). She bugged me incessantly the rest of the weekend for another one, then my nephew found out about it, and he wanted one too, but I got out of doing another one. But I guarantee the next time I'm visiting, I'll be pulled into making up a wild story for them.

So, anyone who says the oral tradition is dead... lies. All kids need is someone to start telling them exciting adventure stories that involve them, and they're hooked.

uno, due, tre

As usual, it takes three disparate things to bring a short story together for me. I really do not know why this, but it happens time and time again. Today it was a month-old failed idea for the pole 69 contest at Astounding Tales floating around in my head. It's been snowing and there is the most phenomenal set of icicles hanging off my front deck roof. And I was catching up on blogs earlier and found Vera Nazarian's entry of Jan 30. That was the third piece of the puzzle. Once I had it, all three pieces came together and I have a single short story to write, tentatively titled "The Icicle Garden." And really, the new conglomerate idea has little to do with the three pieces of origin. It just took that particular combo to make something new.

Confluence, Fate, and there's no such thing as coincidence

The rest of my novel fell into place tonight and I have a new short story idea called "The Graveside Devil."

And this is why I continually have to remind myself not to stress over 1) perceived lack of new ideas, and 2) plotting issues. Now, mind you, it doesn't particularly help to remind myself that it will all work out eventually, that I can point to my own damned journal and show myself, time and time again, how it all works out in the end when the pieces are ready to come together. What can I say? I'm an impatient soul and I get frustrated when my creative world gets scrambled and stays that way. It doesn't matter that it will right itself at some future date, I want it set right NOW.

(And this is precisely why I recently wrote about refusing to ask my muses for assistance. I'd be getting that smug "I told you so" right about now instead of satisfied silence.)