Writing, etc.
I had a relatively productive writing day. Having to get some more material ready for Odyssey is a great motivator. I pulled out two stories I had started that take place in the world of my novel and decided I can probably work with them.
I wrote three pages of a story I had started to sketch out tentatively titled "The Jewel Swallower," which is a bit different from most of the things I write, and it may take a turn I didn't expect, which is probably a good thing.
I decided there was a story told by one character to another in my novel that I could expand into a short story if I found the right way to frame it. I think I have a frame, but now I need to find some interesting conclusion. I wrote three and a half pages of that story.
The hard thing about writing short stories, particularly fantasy ones (at least for me) is that if you do too much world-building, they turn into novels, but not enough, and you end up with a short short that is more about a single thought or idea. It is not that hard for me to come up with a setting, characters, and so forth, but coming up with a satisfying bit of conflict that can be resolved in a few pages is not easy.
It is much easier for me to write "mainstream," real-world stories where characters come to some conclusion about their life without there being anything remotely magical, fantastic, or supernatural. But I want to get better at writing short fantasy because fantasy is what I like to read most, and my fantasy novel is the single most important thing to me I've ever written.
I wrote three pages of a story I had started to sketch out tentatively titled "The Jewel Swallower," which is a bit different from most of the things I write, and it may take a turn I didn't expect, which is probably a good thing.
I decided there was a story told by one character to another in my novel that I could expand into a short story if I found the right way to frame it. I think I have a frame, but now I need to find some interesting conclusion. I wrote three and a half pages of that story.
The hard thing about writing short stories, particularly fantasy ones (at least for me) is that if you do too much world-building, they turn into novels, but not enough, and you end up with a short short that is more about a single thought or idea. It is not that hard for me to come up with a setting, characters, and so forth, but coming up with a satisfying bit of conflict that can be resolved in a few pages is not easy.
It is much easier for me to write "mainstream," real-world stories where characters come to some conclusion about their life without there being anything remotely magical, fantastic, or supernatural. But I want to get better at writing short fantasy because fantasy is what I like to read most, and my fantasy novel is the single most important thing to me I've ever written.