Short Stories are Weird

I've been thinking again about my love of long-form fiction ("Novels"), and my general inability to write good short-form fiction ("Short stories").

Which is weird, because my most successful, best paid gig ever was a short story I had published. I'm still very proud of it, all things considered. But doing short stories has always been a struggle for me, whereas novels flow much easier.

Now, that stated, short stories are a DREAM to edit compared to a novel. Hard word limits are actually really good in most cases, because I can focus exactly on how close I am to being done overall, rather than trying to make sure that each strand of the story is completed satisfactorily and that I don't leave too much hanging. Plus, on a good day I will crank out 5k words, easy, and most short stories require me to only write for a day or two before the first draft is done and I can move on to editing.

All of those are good things. And yet.

I mean, it's mostly irrelevant. I've only submitted two short stories in the last year and a half, and both of them were for the same short story contest (links will show up on this here website when I have links to share!), whereas in the same time I've submitted three novels and am working on a fourth. But still! I miss having time to write short stories without feeling like it was "taking me away" from the work I also wanted to do.

I guess that's part of my recent drive to get the Writers Group back off the ground. That was fertile ground for short stories, both to write and to give feedback on.

Anyway.

I'm continuing work on Novel 4 right now, and it's coming along pretty well. I'm approaching the portion of the Tintin story which I'm basing this one off of that's a bit mystical (Tintin ends up on an alien asteroid floating, for some reason, in the ocean and it starts doing weird and zany stuff, none of which makes sense in a modern understanding of science), but I can probably fix that with weird sci-fi-y-ness, as I usually do. At least, that's the current plan! We'll see where Tintian leads us... just figure out what your hero wants, and then follow her.