Between mid August and early September, I wrote about 30,000 words of short stories set in two separate Sword & Sorcery worlds of my own creation. I have some other stories planned in both of those worlds as well, and then I’ll turn them into two short story collections, probably next year. Most of those stories are submitted and I’m waiting to hear back from editors on whether these will go anywhere or not. So it was a nice productive streak where the stories came out quite successfully.
If you want a taste, one of them was published a few years ago at Old Moon Quarterly, but then I republished it at my substack earlier this year, along with a follow up story. These are both about a character called Vinshya and set on a Flat Earth. I think I wrote both these stories in 2015 or so.
(Speaking of Old Moon Quarterly, I’ll have a story out in their Arthurian Issue sometime next year, I believe. There’s more information at their most recent crowdfunding campaign.)
After all that kind of success and the hype around Silksong coming out, I decided to write a Hollow Knightesque story. Mixing Arthuria with Beetles seemed like a very me idea and I was all set to dive in and have some fun.
On False Starts
And I was having fun.
Too much fun, as it turns out.
My goal was to write a short story. Specifically something between, like, 3,000 words and 5,000 words. That’s sort of the top range for many short story venues and makes for about twenty pages of fiction.
Since I had a target range, I felt like I was in a good position, especially after all that sword & sorcery goodness that came pouring out of me. I had a novel and fascinating world idea and a few characters ready to make for some interesting narratives.
I blasted out about 3,000 words one evening…and I had barely started the story. This got the old noodle twirling and I realized I likely had a novel or at least a novella on my hands. But that was all right! I had a plan.
I set those 3,000 words aside and decided to begin in media res with a fast, down and dirty little narrative built around a violent conflict. I woke up at 5am and set down to write…and after about 2,000 words, I was nowhere near finishing. Once again, even this short idea had this need to balloon outward.
So I tried one last time, deciding on still a narrower conflict. And that, too, just spiraled in such a way that I knew it would be well past my target length.
So what’s to be learned from all this?
Well, one thing is that stories need to be the length they need to be. While I wish I could have packaged this into a short story length, I just couldn’t crack it.
This was very demoralizing, though! Especially after the high of all these other short stories that seemed to just flow through me.
But it was a worthwhile exercise, trying a story three different ways, with three different approaches. It’s not the first time I’ve had an experience like this. Once, it even turned into this recently published story, which then became a novel (more on this below).
So if you come to a story idea and it doesn’t work out the first time, give it another shot!
Updates
September’s been a strange and discombobulated month in this rather unpleasant year. Even so, there have been some fun things happening.
- Over on substack, I wrote about my growing dissatisfaction with the whole business of newsletters.
- Had a cyberpunk story out at Apocalypse Confidential
- Was a guest for the first episode of Broken River Radio, where I talk about my life of writing. We touch on the importance of reading, literary misdirection, how frustration leads to breakthroughs, and confidence. You can watch or listen (or both!) at that link, also on Spotify and Apple.
- Have a short horror story coming out in Flash Phantoms tomorrow.
- My interview with Dan Hallagan, the game designer of one of my favorite games, is coming out tomorrow over on my podcast. You can listen on Spotify or Apple or even here on my website.
- All the artwork is now complete for my illustrated novel Horus & Motherfucker that was crowdfunded back in August, so I’m hoping to have books out to backers by Halloween!
- Regular readers here will know I’m back to keeping my writing diary of my new novel Twilight of the Wolves. If you’re interested in the production of a novel as it’s being produced, these writing diaries are worth taking a look at. Work on the novel continues, though it’s taken a new dimension as I had to step away from it for about six weeks.
- I also participated in Swordtember, to a degree. It’s meant to be a daily prompt for drawing, but I used it for writing poems. My life got severely sidelined for a few weeks so I bounced out of it for a few weeks, but I ended up with 21 poems. Basically a chapbook, yeah?
What’s Next?
- Writing of Twilight of the Wolves continues. My goal is to be finished with the first novel by the end of October.
- I’m going to begin serializing Twilight of the Wolves, probably starting in November. I’ll share more about this as we get closer.
- I also think I’ll serialize a literary novel on my substack, despite becoming increasingly frustrated with that place. Even so, it should be an interesting experiment.
- Also, if you checked out my substack post linked way up above, you’ll know I’m going to begin making zines and sending them out to paying subscribers of my newsletter over there. So if you’d like some physical mail of my writing, now’s the time to become a paying subscriber over there!
And finally, despite the troubled and tortured process of my Swordtember attempt, I’m going to be doing Morktober starting tomorrow. So expect daily posts based on the prompts below.
While these are meant for the TTRPG Mork Borg, I’m not really going to be confined to that and will just write whatever I feel like. Once again, probably going to write poems, since that was fun.
That’s all for now.
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