Short Stories and Organizing

So I'm still about halfway through "The Language of the Unheard" and while I'm wrapping that up, I've decided to try my hand at some short stories. I haven't written many short stories since high school, where I used to write them almost exclusively. I've heard they're a good way to get your foot in the door and if you get them published in a magazine, they might even make you a little cash!

So my first one is entitled "The Banks of Belronan" and it is a classic tragic romance about selkies, the mythical seal women of Ireland. I'm writing as a frame story with an old woman telling a tale she was told as a child. We'll see how it turns out.

I also finally organized all my little scribblings of story ideas and tidbits into Microsoft OneNote and I feel so much better now. I had to go through two notebooks, the notes section of my phone and countless random pieces of paper to find them all, but they're all sorted by type into the one program now. There's places for me to add more notes to them later on and pictures of things that inspired me etc. I am including an amazing picture of the Aurora Borialis that just keeps me in awe. Anyway, now I don't have to worry about losing things and when I want to find an idea for a story, I just have one place to look. In fact, the selkie story was one that I had thought of a while back and forgotten about until I did this.

Aaron is going camping with his brothers for a few days next week so I'll have to house to myself. I plan on eating lots of cheese-filled foods (he's lactose intolerant but I love cheese), doing a lot of writing, staying up ridiculously late, sleeping in, and watching plenty of chick flicks.

"Christmas at the Holiday Inn" Preview

So for you, all my faithful readers, I have a Christmas present coming up.  I am writing a short story entitled "Christmas at the Holiday Inn" which I will be posting here closer to Christmas.  Hopefully it won't be too long to post on here, but if it is, I'll just find another way to put it online and then post a link. 

The basic premise for the story will be a number of people from all different parts of the country and world and different walks of life who all end up getting stuck at the Seattle airport in the snow on Christmas Eve.  They are put up at the Holiday Inn by the airline, and one family, deciding to teach their children about the true meaning of Christmas, decides to put together a whole Christmas celebration at the hotel.  Hilarity and warm feelings ensue.

So look for "Christmas at the Holiday Inn" in it's entirety closer to Christmas!

Happy Holidays to you all!

The Final Countdown!

Well it is officially one week until NaNoWriMo starts! I am more than ready for it to begin and already have figured out where I am going to be at midnight on Halloween. I'll be at the local pizza place, which is open late, with my laptop and a slice of pizza and at the stroke of midnight I will furiously type out the first 1,667 words (the daily quota for NaNoWriMo) before bed. Now I'll probably have to work the following morning at nine o'clock or so, so I may not be the happiest camper in the world, but it's all worth it in pursuit of literary mediocrity.

On a somewhat side note, I came up with an idea for a fabulous short story which I will probably write after NaNo. Now I am taking a sort of risk, I suppose, by putting my idea out here, so NO TOUCHY TOUCHY! HANDS OFF MY IDEA!

Anyway, now that that official admonition has been issued, the idea is to write an Old West rendition of the Shakespeare play Much Ado about Nothing. It's my favorite of all of his plays and I feel it could be perfectly set on a cattle ranch in Montana. The only thing I have to figure out is if I can actually get it published/enter it in contests, or if it is plagiarism since it's a rendition of a separate work. I know Shakespeare is public property or whatever the legal terms is, but since I didn't come up with the idea myself, is it still ok? I think it is, since books like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies basically do the same thing. But I'll have to look into that some more. Either way, it would be fun to write.

NOTE: After doing a big more research on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, it appears that that book has Jane Austin credited as co-author. I wonder if that makes it ok?

Short Stories

So when I was a kid I always always wanted to be a writer. I loved writing short stories and hated writing anything longer than that. From before I could even write, I would dictate stories to my mom (usually about a girl named Rose who incidentally had the exact same things happen to her as happened to me, only with way cooler outcomes. Like instead of simply stubbing her toe falling off the swing, she would break her arm. Etc.) Then when I was about nineteen I suddenly had an urge to write a real novel, "The Great American Novel" in fact, so I sat down with my laptop and no outline whatsoever and wrote the first few chapters of what would later become Runaway Train. (Sort of. My computer crashed and I lost those first few chapters and then later started over and rewrote them with a few details changed). Then I discovered NaNo and wrote my first NaNo novel in 2008 which was pretty much a load of crap with a horribly Mary Sue main character and no conflict whatsoever. Then I rewrote Runaway Train as I mentioned above in June of this year and now I'm going into NaNo prepared for a third novel.

So all in all, it's been several years since I've written anything other than journal and blog entries, novels, and an occasional poem. I used to really enjoy short stories because they can be so intense, so real. Also, one technique I used to use all the time when I was a kid, which I would still love to really pull off successfully, is to write a short story with no names. Only a couple of characters, maybe as few as two, and not name any of them. I did it a couple of times as a teenager with varying degrees of success.

So anyway, I've had a couple of novel ideas that would probably either need to be a short story, or would need some serious subplots to really pull off as a novel, so I was thinking about trying my hand at some short stories after NaNo. By that point, I'll have two hopefully halfway decent novels, which I will be revising, editing and hopefully querying some agents about, so getting some short stories under my belt might be good. Also, I've heard that having some published work is useful when querying agents which I hope to be doing by next summer or so, and I currently have none (well, except for a poem which I published in the Highlights for Children's reader section when I was 12).

So I found a few short story contests with no entry fees that have deadlines in the late winter, early spring, so I think I'm going to write a few short stories after NaNo. Wish me luck!