Apr 28, 2009

Gah! Just when I thought I was doing well, I ran into a brick wall with the PAD challenge. I finally settled on an event to use for Day 25, but Day 26 (write a poem about a miscommunication) and Day 27 (a poem of longing) have left me stumped. I’d better shake it off, only a few more days to go and May 1st is the cut off for submitting the poems.

So, while I was waiting for my muse to get off his butt and inspire me to write poetry, I thought I’d spend some time editing. You know, like the goal I posted yesterday promised. Only first I had to check out AW and for some reason ended up in the short story forum.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a short story. I can’t honestly say why I stopped, other than at some point I must have decided I was a novelist instead of a short story writer and never the twain shall meet.

Silly notion that. I've got a lot of short stories in my files. Some of them need a lot of work, but some of them aren't bad. I’ll have to remember to include short stories in my goal setting.

Isaac Espriu posted an interesting piece about word counts yesterday. You can read the whole thing here and I suggest you do. I’ve never really given much thought to how I should be determining word counts and I was surprised at the difference the different methods made. I posted a comment showing the results for my own experiment with word counts, again, with surprising results.

Okay, a topic for the longing poem came to me so I’m off to write poetry. Maybe I’ll come up with something for miscommunication on the way.

One can only hope.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Ooh - i've been linked :) thanks.

Personally I think short stories teach us more about how to write novels than anything else. I use short stories to experiment with voice and tense and viewpoint and sentence structure and other stuff too :D. I also find it's a lot easier to write one big work over a period of time if i've got little works to keep me fresh.

(and yay for goals!)