Bringing home the stars

I’ve finished my new short story, though it won’t be going up on the website for a while because magazines like exclusivity for the period that their current issue is running for anything that they publish. That’s fair enough. I’m passing it over tomorrow to my resident editor because, like most Authors, I find it very hard to edit my own stuff. Then it will be into the rounds of sending this thing out and trying to find a magazine interested in it. I have three good magazines that I can send it to, although for one of them their hard maximum word limit is only 10,000 words so I will have to lose nearly 1,850 words from the story to make it fit their limit. The other two are more generous and will take up to around 15,000 word stories, so that’s okay.

The next story I am going to work on is planned to be a short flash fiction piece of maybe around 1,500 words (you can never really predict with any great accuracy the final word count). It’s a hard sci-fi idea I had a few weeks ago, so I thought I would get it out of my system. After that I am toying with a more conventional short story that is just literary fiction highlighting the interactions of native communities with immigrants when they arrive, displaced by war. It will be a genre change for me from what I usually write, but it was such a good idea that I should at least give it a go. It may be though that I ditch it in favour of something else; that happens every once in a while.

I’m pretty pleased that I’ve written this large short story straight out of the back of writing my novel. If I can keep this pace up I shall be very happy. I still need to get the second draft of my novel done though, so that may come after the flash fiction piece, or even instead of it if the idea doean’t work in the end. Only time will tell.