Hellchick

I've been a writer for several years now, mostly of short stories, a few of which have been published in print collections. (If you're wondering where my links to Amazon are, you'll have to go info-less. I like to keep my pen name detached somewhat from my real name.)

I've gotten pretty good at short stories. Sure, that sounds arrogant, but I've had a long time to work at it, and being published in print five times in Best Of anthologies has led me to believe that my work must be at least a little good.

My main problem has been expanding my abilities. Fortunately, a bunch of us at PlanetCrap have started, seemingly by accident, a monthly writing exercise that's working out pretty well for all of us who are participating. The gist is this: we decide on some kind of vague theme, and then we have a couple of weeks to write a short story based on it. We can interpret the theme fairly liberally, and we don't limit the genre. We're on our third theme, and while I haven't submitted a story for round three yet, I'm really surprised with how happy I am with my submissions for rounds one and two.

The first round's theme was "someone regularly sees someone else on the bus route they've taken for years. One day, that person isn't there." The story I came up with is "Now And on the Bus Route of Our Death". What I liked most about this story was the dialogue for Andras. I had fun writing it, and dialogue has always been my weak point. The only problem is that as happy as I am with the dialogue, I still fell back on something I tend to do in all of my stories: focus on one person. In order for me to make my dialogue stronger, I really need to flesh out the other person speaking more than I do. As it is, Richard in this story is practically a mannequin. Fortunately, I know this, so I know exactly what I need to do to make this story better.

The second round was based on secrets: "one person turns to another and tells them something they've never told anyone before." The story that came out of that round is "Lay My Burden Down". I am so happy with this story that I think it's my best story yet, even out of the stories that have been published in print. What's even better? I think the story has the potential to be even better and more fleshed out than it is. I think it could even be a novel.

Which would be great. Because the one thing I really, really want to do is write a novel. I'm actually working on one now. But even with as many short stories as I've written up until now, I have the hardest time with a novel. There's something frightening about it, I think. Short stories come to me suddenly, and I sit down and generally write them all in one sitting. But novels must be done over time and with regular commitment, the kind of commitment that requires you to sit down at the keyboard and write someting even if you think it's going to be crap. That's the scary part. I have a hard time writing the connective tissue of a novel, because there's so little of that in the short stories that I write.

However, one quote, whose source I can't remember at the moment, helps me through this: "I can edit a bad page. I can't edit a blank page."

Which is good, because I think I'm a really good editor. So I'm trying hard to just write and write and not edit myself ahead of time, and then go back and look at the novel when I've finished it and try to edit it as if it were someone else's work. Hell, by then it'll probably have been so long that I won't remember it and it'll feel like someone else's work.

So I've made a commitment to write every single day, a minimum of 500 words (too little, really, but it's a nice low goal). So wish me luck.