Short stories are a beast I’m learning to tackle.
A lot of times when I sit down to write out an idea, it spirals out and out and out, and all of a sudden I’ve got a novella on my hands. Other times, I work on a seed of a story and it doesn’t seem to want to budge in any direction to go anywhere.
I finished up one short story that I thought was good to go for publication, only to hear feedback that it needed to have more. So I pulled it off the lineup to work on more. I’ve got about a half-dozen seeds that have beginnings and vague premises that I absolutely love, but stumble once they’re let out of the gate, unsure of where they are supposed to go.
There is one short story I wrote for a friend a few years ago that I’m hoping falls in the Goldilocks Zone of short stories–all it needs is a bit more to tighten up the beginning and end. Then comes polishing before I grab a few contacts to see who’d like to look it over, before I pack it a lunch and send it off on its own into the world. Sounds like a perfect late spring project to me.
Once I accomplish that, there’s another story I’ve had in my head for a while that I can at least start to lay down the skeleton for, and maybe I can go back to some older ideas from my speculative fiction Richmond days and see what I can coax out of them.