Lilith Saintcrow

So…we’ve got two short stories struggling to be born.

* The Heart Is Always Right, a weird little piece involving gargoyles and a bit of Beauty and the Beast (with vampires!), is at 3k. The limit on this one is 8-10K, for the Supernaturals on Vacation anthology. I have the ending, I just need to get there. Plenty of room to do so, and I’m telling it in first-person, so it’s…good. I like this story because I like the hero, who I am going to try to make nameless. Maybe I can even pull it off. Deadline: Feb 1.

* Say Yes is for a book of YA vampire fiction. We’ve got two girls, a popular one and a not-so-popular one, a vampire, and a coming of age. ~400 words right now, and they’ve been hard ones because I’ve been doing the thing I always do with shorts: fretting and fretting and making decisions in the first hundred words that will affect the rest of the story. Deadline: Jan 5.

Short stories are very, very difficult for me. Novel structure I can do all day long, I enjoy it. Short stories are outright hard, and I have to have them all put together inside my head before I lunge through and force them out onto paper. I have to do a lot of thinking to make a short come out right. Each time I finish one I feel relieved and swear never to do that again because it stretches all sorts of mental muscles, usually in “demm oncomfortabul weez”, as Pashpush used to say.

So, wish me luck. I know I’m ahead of deadline and it’s ridiculous for me to worry about it, but each short story feels like a do-or-die situation. My brain has a hard time convincing my adrenals that everything is, indeed, okay.

Argh. Now how do I do private school in California in less than five hundred words?

*headdesk*

PS: Mazoku, don’t fear. The Demon’s Librarian should be out early next year for you. I think you’ll like that one, too.

Related posts:

1. Doing NaNo This Year
2. Win “The Eternal Kiss”
3. Oh, dear sweet fluffy Lord…

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Real Life, Writing (About). You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.