I pledged to write ten short stories in the month of February. I've finished one. And I officially hate it. Granted, I hate all my writing once I'm done with it, so I'm right on schedule.
Not gonna lie: writing short stories is much easier than writing an entire novel, at least for me it is. Just a few minor quibbles:
Words
It's generally accepted that short stories should be no fewer than 7000 words, but more than 1000. (Fewer than 1000 is flash fiction, or micro-fiction, something I want to try my hand at, too.) Mine are in the 2000-3000 word range, which makes them on the shorter side of standard short fiction, but I like my writing to be kind of spare. (Amy Hempel is my go-to for inspiration.) But I'm not sure where spare bisects dull.
Shitty First Drafts
I've got in set in my mind that a short story's shitty first draft should be exponentially less shitty than a novels. I have no idea why, but my inner editor tells me this is so, and I'm not at the stage where I tell her to go fuck herself yet.
Google Docs is a Being a Bear
I've used Google Docs -- or now, Google Drive -- for years now, and I've never had a problem with it until recently when it started "misplacing" my documents. When I open Drive, I don't see the last thing I've edited, but when I go to "recent docs" it's there. Everything else seems to be in its place, so maybe it's Google's way of telling me that particular shitty first draft is extra shitty, and it's hiding it from me for my own protection. Yep, that has to be it.
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