Adam here again. When I left you a couple of weeks ago I was standing at a desk in our loft having recently been laid off. I was working a job search with a more strategic plan than before and splitting time to try out writing as well.
Shortly after that I had to take the desk down to sitting again. I found that while I can write and even read standing, I cannot do video’s very well at all. I have some video classes I am working through related to writing and it just wasn’t working. I think it was Wednesday I brought it to sitting, timing how long it took. (About 10 minutes from full standing to sitting with everything put away.)
It turned out to be very good that I set it to sitting as Thursday I came down with some sort of bug. I was basically out of it until this Thursday. I tried to get back into some semblance of order Tuesday, but it really just exhausted me mentally and emotionally with Wednesday really not being a good day. Even still today (Friday) I am coughing, have a sore throat, and am not fully recovered.
I am moving forward though. One of the writers I have looked to for some ideas on moving that part forward talks about doing really short writing to help hone skills. The idea is that short stories need to have a beginning, middle, and end just as novels do. To help get better at telling a full story in a short time she challenges people to try writing extremely short stories. I have started with twitter stories. These are tough, 140 characters is barely 3 sentences.
She also mentions doing Micro and Flash Fiction. 55 word stories and 100 word stories. I’ve started on the 55 word stories and am looking at doing twitter and 55 word stories for a few days before adding 100 word stories. Interestingly she suggests the 100 word stories are harder than the 55 word ones. Apparently the little extra freedom to flesh out a story is also enough to create a tension in keeping it short enough.
55 words each is to short for me to make posts here of those stories. I will post them to Facebook though. If you’ve read this far then please feel free to help out by providing feedback on stories I post to Facebook. Ultimately over the next few weeks I hope to build skill doing various random short fiction while going through some classes before I start my larger world-building.
The vision is that world-building will result in linked short stories, novellas, and actual novels. Most of that writing will stay behind closed doors as the collection builds. I don’t want to start releasing there until there are a decent number of short stories and at least three finished novella’s. I am getting ahead of myself though, it’ll probably be no earlier than April for any of that, and that’s assuming things don’t change around here.
Today I’ll close out with letting you know there are three new 55 word stories being posted to Facebook and I might get some Twitter ones done too.