When I first began to write, I wrote short stories. Short stories felt manageable. They seemed like a good place to learn the craft and art of fiction. At the time, that was the conventional wisdom – start out small and work your way up. Sell a few short stories and use them to leverage a novel. What could be simpler?

Right.

I quickly learned that short stories are a lot harder to write than they look. For one thing, they're pretty closely related to poetry. Every word counts. There is no room for error. One false step and – disaster..

Nevertheless, I somehow managed to sell a few short stories. Then I decided to try my hand at writing novels. I discovered that I seem to have a better innate feel for novels. A novel is more forgiving than a short story. So I stopped writing short stories for a few of years. They didn't pay all that well, anyway.

And found that I missed it. The things that made short stories frustrating to write were precisely what made them rewarding.

So, I'm back to working on short fiction when I can. The idea is to flog myself by posting regular installments of a work in-progress on the fiction log page. That way maybe I'll actually get something done.