So I was reading Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market the other night. The first third or so has interviews on different topics of interest to writers, which is great because I get to procrastinate shopping my story around while I read the interviews, instead of digging through the market listings. In one interview, Elizabeth Moon said she knew she was naturally a novel writer since she could never finish a short story. I wonder if I’m in the same boat. I finished one short story, but I did get a couple of comments from first readers that it read like a novel treatment — and it was a lot (30 years or so) to cram into 6000 words. The story I’m working on now just hit 4400 words and I realize I can’t wrap it up as a short story the way it exists now. So my options are three:

1. Forget about the length (and all hope of wrapping another finished product anytime soon) and make it a novel.

3. Finish the first draft as briefly as is feasible and fix it in rewrites.

Option 1 only makes sense if I’m going to give up on short stories, and it’s way too soon for that (after all, I did finish one). Besides, finishing a work of specific length is an important discipline, and I don’t think I can delay my gratification long enough to write a whole novel at this point. It felt too good to finish the first story. At under 500 words a day, it takes long enough just to do a short piece.

Option 3 seems practical, but what if this story doesn’t want to be short? The idea for it flowed out of a specific situation, and I have yet to come up with a resolution for said situation. There may not be one in ten thousand words or less. But you’ll notice I left out…

2. End it with a cliffhanger, and make it a sort of serial.

With this option I abandon any hope of marketing this particular story as is. But there are some things to like about option 2:

• Readers love serials. Get them hooked on the product and keep pushing. See also: TV and comics.

• The story would be (more or less) complete in itself while leading into a larger experience. This is kind of scary, not knowing where the whole thing is going (see also: X-Files), but I also have some ideas for tying it into the novel that’s sitting on my back burner.

• I get to build a universe as if I’m writing a novel, but do it a bit at a time (and hopefully not write myself into many corners).

• The more I study the short story, the more I realize how underrated it is. So no one buys them. Who cares? Novel sales are down too, with a lot of people citing the death of the American attention span. Well, a ten-page story requires much less commitment than a three-hundred-page novel. Maybe the time is ripe for the short story (or some version of it) to make a comeback–and if the old-guard publishing industry isn’t interested, well, they’re a topic for another post.

If I do this, don’t expect a logical order of progression. We aren’t talking linear like a TV show–we’ll all be turning over puzzle pieces one at a time and trying to figure out where they fit in the big picture. And hopefully there is a big picture.

So what do you think? Too ambitious, or a sneaky way of avoiding responsibility? Let’s save the story before it’s too late. Who’s with me?

One of the writing projects I’ve been working on over the last few months is a 6000-word short story called Ends. I finally wrapped up the last edits and submitted it to a contest. It’s the first fiction of any real length that I can call a finished product. While I decide where to shop it next, I’m going to let you lot have at it. No one sells their first story anyway, right? So enjoy, everyone.

Grab the PDF, and an excerpt, from this page.

Happy reading!

I’m thrilled to announce that TVgasm’s fall recapper auditions are over, and I made the cut. That’s right! This fall, I’ll be ripping into some poor, unsuspecting TV show on a weekly basis. I don’t know which one yet, but I’ll keep you posted.

Huge piles of thanks to all of you who voted for me. This is my first honest-to-goodness writing gig (unless you count the AskSpace thing a couple of years ago). It’s unpaid, but I should pick up some readers, and I’ll get to find out if I can produce under a deadline. Besides, now I can sit in front of the TV and say it’s for my writing career.

Stay tuned!

So about that mystery assignment I spoke of last time: I’m auditioning for a writer’s slot at TVgasm. (The name is silly, but the recaps are hilarious.)

The audition process is basically a head-to-head competition against the other submitters. The powers that be must have liked me, because I got a first-round bye. Now, I’m counting on your help to get past Round 2.

Head over to this page and vote for my recap of Wife Swap! You have to sign up for a message board account, but you love me that much, don’t you? I thought so. Now get to it!

(from Daily 5)

How a character handles a given object can be immensely revealing. Briefly describe, as specifically as you can, how the following characters would handle a pencil:

• a harried middle aged librarian named Greta Hurleyburton

Wears one over each ear and is constantly sharpening them with old-school crank sharpener mounted on her desk

• an elderly lawyer named Gregory Wooster IV

Imports handcrafted koa wood pencils from Argentina and keeps them in a humidor on his desk. Uses special Amazon rubber eraser and sharpens with a pocketknife (he likes to whittle also)

• a ten year old boy named Bruce

gets the big fat sparkly ones in 20-packs for pencil fighting, and trades them for candy

• a purple-haired installation artist who signs her work “Ahn R Keyy”

Sticks pencils in the eyes and private parts of mannequins as a theme. Makes pencil pincushions out of dolls of certain political figures.

Prompt: Write something that incorporates a squid, a lampshade and the smell of burning tortillas.

Another tantrum, sure enough. This one’s a doozy. The house shakes with the screaming. I pause in my dinner prep, trying to muster the intestinal fortitude necessary to ignore the assault on my ears. You know that chemical that causes the feeling of stress, the one I can’t think of right now because I’m too stressed out? Yeah, that one. I’m up to my eyeballs in it. What’s that crash from the vicinity of the living room? I run in to check. She threw her stuffed squid at the lamp and knocked it over. The lamp is fine, but the lampshade, the one that my wife found for $1.50 at Michaels and spent an hour painting dots on, is toast. The metal ring tore right out of the cheap paper shade material. I can’t wait to hear what she’s going to say about this. Not the toddler, the wife. The toddler is making her views clearly felt right now. As I wonder how the afternoon could get any worse, I realize that the new smell is that of my tortillas burning in the toaster oven.

By now you’ve heard that Copyblogger’s Twitter Writing Contest is over, if you were following it. Of the dozens of prizes handed out, the best prize was unexpected: the winners scored a mention in the LA Times. Talk about instant exposure.

Instead of wasting time wondering how close I came, I’m following a tip from screenwriter John August (via Daring Fireball): take a good piece and reverse engineer it. “Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship,” he says. “Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.”

First Place

“Time travel works!” the note read. “However you can only travel to the past and one-way.” I recognized my own handwriting and felt a chill. (Ron Gould)

This one has a perfect three-act structure. The first three words are a killer hook. The second sentence sets up the conflict, the third brings it home. It makes me wonder where the narrator found the note, and what happened to him or her — in the future, in the past, whenever. First through third place all made great use of the last-sentence twist.

Second Place

Tony was a snitch, so I wasn’t surprised when his torso turned up in the river. What did surprise me, though, was where they found his head. (Anthony Juliano)

“Tony was a snitch” — again with the hook. You know exactly what’s coming when you read those four words. But you want to know who had Tony whacked and, of course, where they found that head. Also, what’s the narrator’s relationship to Tony? I believe someone commented that this one would make a great novel opener.

Third Place

When Gibson hit that homerun in the fall of eighty-eight, my old man had never been so happy. He hugged me for the first time. I was eleven. (Thelonius Monk)

This one is my favorite. It packs so much tone and character into a small space — you can almost see the sepia photograph. You get everything you need to know about the relationship between the narrator and his father. It’s economical and understated. Contrast the laconic bittersweetness of this one with the emotional tempest in the next one…

Honorable Mention 1

Happily sobbing she held the boy, her memory of his violent conception falling away. She had learned to love him, this would be her revenge. (Melissa Pierce)

This one hits pretty hard and never lets up. “Happily sobbing”, “violent conception” and “revenge” are tempered by “she had learned to love him” — a triumph of will over emotion. I have to take a couple of points off for a missing comma after “sobbing” and a misplaced one in the last sentence (it should be a semicolon or a dash).

Honorable Mention 2

The priest at the funeral home asked if she had been a loving mother. The children all stared at each other. The silence spoke volumes. (Derek)

My second favorite. Death and mommy issues are always good material. At first it seemed to me that “at the funeral home” could be cut without taking anything away from the story, but I think the word “funeral” in the first sentence is necessary to set the mood.

Congratulations to all the winners! I’ll be stalking you all on Twitter soon.

At last, an opportunity to redeem all the literary mojo I’ve spent on Twitter! Copyblogger is running a Twitter writing contest.

Here’s my entry:

He hunched by the bar phone, randomly dialing lipstick numbers from the dingy mirror nearby. On his last quarter, a familiar voice: “Ernie?”

“Joan here. A meteor just landed in my yard.”

“A what?”

“You know, one of those rocks from space. It’s right out in my front yard. I’m lucky it missed my mailbox.”

“Joan, aren’t those things, like, dangerous? And hot and stuff?”

“Well, I heard this ripping noise, there was a flash, and then a noise like thunder. I thought there was an earthquake or someone’s gas grill had blown up or something. But I looked outside and there was this fire in my front yard, and a big hole the size of my coffee table.”

Against the background hum and hiss of the children, the bird and monkey calls were bright clear notes tapped out on a piano.