Short Thoughts

I’ve never been much of a short fiction fan, either to read or write.  Usually I find short stories frustrating, because if an author does a good job with the writing I invariably want to read more.  And if the material isn’t strong enough for a longer work, well then why bother to write it in the first place?  So I’ve turned out very few short stories myself, and I’ve never investigated the techniques behind creating good ones.

Yet here I am, trying to write one that I can put on Manybooks.  The rationale behind this is to create an expanded market for my published works by giving away a series of short works.  These will be prequels, mostly.  I think.

So far I am enjoying the process.  I finished the first chapter today.  My biggest problem is trying to strike a balance between action and detail in this reduced format, because usually I like to do lots of scene-setting and description.  No time for that with only 20-25k words though.  But I have to admit, it’s pretty cool watching the word counter slide over so quickly!

Erotic shorts are the fastest-growing segment of the publishing industry today, so who knows what I might end up writing if I find I enjoy short stories after all…  🙂

 

New Project

While I am doing research for Operation Darkspar, I am going ahead with another project I have had in the back of my mind for some time.  It is a series of four long stories (can’t call them “short” when each one will be about 25,000 words) which will form a sort of prequel to the events in Song of the Arkafina.  Well, oddly enough, the story falls both before and after SOTA, but since the Amaranthine are able to travel through time, that makes sense.  Sort of.  To me, anyway.

I’ve called the collection Red Feather Fables, because the leader of the Firaithi wears a red feather in his braid.  The first story, Quondam, is named after the Firaithi word for past.  For those of you who haven’t read Dawnmaid, I’ll explain.  The Firaithi, who are a travelling people, consider time to be a helical country, winding through the Gyre.  Each kind of time is a location in that land.  Quondam is the past, Prox the present, Sequent the future and Nowhen, an indeterminate place beyond or outside of time.  So I plan to write four stories, each with a fable attached, dealing with some of the history of the Amaranthine, who are descended from the Firaithi.