A digression to shorts

Re-writes were going like gangbusters, but then I had to move house. Also, I've talked about that for the last few posts and I'm sick of it, as I am sure are you. This post is going to be about an area of writing that I've neglected for years.

SHORTS

 

That's right! To distract myself from endless, and possibly fruitless, re-writes, I have decided that a shorter term goal might be for the best to kick start the confidence levels. To that end, it's time to think like an Australian and get into some shorts.

This post is subtitled 'The Idea'.

See?

I'm a Sci Fi nut since birth and there are literally hundreds of online and print magazines that will accept short-form Science Fiction stories, so it was a natural place to start. At conception, my thought process can be fully mapped in the following way:

I'd like to write a short story. Clarkesworld accepts submissions. Holy crap, so do heaps of places. I will write one, then. Okay. Cool. Let's get on that.

The point being that I had absolutely nothing in the way of plot, character or theme in my writerly tank to commit to paper. This would have to be a from-scratch production. I perused some old short stories of mine, which was a waste of time. I really ought to post one or two of them to illustrate exactly how much of a waste of time it was.

Finding no help from my past self (who is a jerk, by the way), I turned to some professional writers. I have a book in one of my moving-house-boxes that contains a bunch of fantastic space opera stories called 'The New Space Opera', and it was a fantastically distracting read. I loved them all. But even so, at the end of six or seven of those tales, I had nothing.

I wish I'd been around to tell my past self this. THIS is what I should have said to myself.

Then my boss said something that sparked one of those weird neuron-bending thought exercises that we all get on occasion. It was a particularly hot day and he was complaining about the smell of some of the people we were working with. He said:

It's thirty-seven degrees and there's no air in here. I have to keep breathing in other people. I hate summer.

It was the way he said it. "Breathing in other people". It'd make a good title, thought I, and so I picked a random name and applied it, deciding that this would be my story title. I ended up with 'Breathing In Gerry Neimeyer'. From there, it was crazy how things snowballed.

Why were they breathing him in? He died in the life support tanks. Who is breathing him in? The 16 year old disaffected son of two Korean engineers assigned to the Titan Settlement Project. How'd Gerry get in to the tanks? He tried to stow away. Or did he? Maybe he tried to sabotage the vessel. Why'd he do that? Well...you get the idea. You've all done it.

My outline is sitting pretty at 600 words. In the next post I'll talk about actually writing it, and how it's different from the novel. In the post after, I'll talk about workshopping it. And finally, I'll keep a track on how it goes on the submission circuit. I'll make sure that I begin each post with [Short] so that, if you'd like to skip these more boring, 'this is what I'm doing' posts, you can.

Until then! I'm off to keep bashing out these words.