sounds cool! good luck and tell us how your progress goes. i am really horrible about short story stuff. my mind is set up tell looong stories i cant just pop one out and be satisfied with it.
i guess advice would be to get your hand on some short stories and 'how to write short stories' books and see what you can do. i think 1100 words a is a bit too teency. what you have there is more of a snippet than a story but you know already that padding it for padding's sake wont work, every single sentence needs to be there for a reason.
anyway on the switching tenses thing, in the Bartimeus trilogy Bartimeus is a geenie and all his scenes are 1st person and they alternate with the *obligatory pre teen boy who discovers magic's* scenes which are done in 3rd person.
a lot of people liked this, a lot of people found it annoying. but in your case, 1st and 3rd pov for the SAME character might not go over very well unless you can really make it work and show the reason for it.
Normally, when I want the reader to specifically know what's in my character's head I'll do something like:
'Oh God, is she gonna shut up soon?' Hayley sighed to herself. 'Every time she does this I start getting a headache. And just the way she has her hair up in those stupid braids. What is she? Twelve?' "Hayley are you even listening to me?" Noreen frowned at her. "Yes, yeah." Hayley sat up straighter. 'Shit, busted!' "Yeah, hey uh... I don't know Noreen, I really can't tell if Justin likes you or not... Why don't you like, just try talking to him or something?" 'Instead of talking to me about it!' she added silently.
i don't really know if 'single quotes plus italics' is the right way to go about indicating thought rather than speech but i think the context makes it pretty clear...
i guess advice would be to get your hand on some short stories and 'how to write short stories' books and see what you can do. i think 1100 words a is a bit too teency. what you have there is more of a snippet than a story but you know already that padding it for padding's sake wont work, every single sentence needs to be there for a reason.
anyway on the switching tenses thing, in the Bartimeus trilogy Bartimeus is a geenie and all his scenes are 1st person and they alternate with the *obligatory pre teen boy who discovers magic's* scenes which are done in 3rd person.
a lot of people liked this, a lot of people found it annoying. but in your case, 1st and 3rd pov for the SAME character might not go over very well unless you can really make it work and show the reason for it.
Normally, when I want the reader to specifically know what's in my character's head I'll do something like:
'Oh God, is she gonna shut up soon?' Hayley sighed to herself. 'Every time she does this I start getting a headache. And just the way she has her hair up in those stupid braids. What is she? Twelve?'
"Hayley are you even listening to me?" Noreen frowned at her.
"Yes, yeah." Hayley sat up straighter. 'Shit, busted!' "Yeah, hey uh... I don't know Noreen, I really can't tell if Justin likes you or not... Why don't you like, just try talking to him or something?" 'Instead of talking to me about it!' she added silently.
i don't really know if 'single quotes plus italics' is the right way to go about indicating thought rather than speech but i think the context makes it pretty clear...
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