Excerpt: Work in Progress.



Third World has a population of half a million and one spaceport. (Bardash Dmytro.)


Hank tore his eyes off Polly Morgensen and tried to contribute something to the discussion.

She sure was beautiful, though. Her chin came up and she looked his way again. He saw it in his peripheral vision.

It was like an illness with him lately.

“Drifters.” Hank had run across one or two over the years.

They were little better than the nomads, who at least had purpose, following the great herds across the unbroken steppe of Third World’s northern hemisphere. Drifters were just that. Nomads stayed clear of settlement and cultivation, knowing there was plenty of room in the world. They needed open range, good grass and water. Drifters sought many things for many reasons. They tended to gravitate to more settled areas. During harvest, when hands were short, they were welcome in some places more than others.

“That’s what they say. They’re camping up around Marjorie’s Way.” Red glanced around, but the other shoppers in the general store ignored them. “Word is they’ve been there a while.”

Perhaps the other people had already heard the news. Hank came into town once or twice in a month, usually a Monday but other days as well.

Nomads follow the herds. It's a big place. (Wing-Chi Poon.)

Marjorie’s Way was a notch in the hills just over the eastern horizon, obscured by the tops of barren pines, one of the few introduced species to do well here. On the other side of the hills there was a brackish marsh at the end of a small run-off that brought a few of the indigenous waterfowl in season. After that, the trail petered out into a maze of hunting camps and thin ribbons of water in a vast marsh which had never been properly explored. People thought it went clear to the Blue Mountains. It was possible.

Drifters were often desperate, fleeing the law, debt more often. Sometimes it was young people running away, or just unfortunates looking for a new home someplace else. Hank had never really thought about it.

“I see.” Hank Beveridge’s homestead was four kilometres out towards the morning sunrise, in the rolling hills where the true grasslands began.

He had a small river, and had painstakingly tanked up the seeps at the base of the hill where it came down. Hank had a small herd of pack, draft and riding animals which he sold in an emergency, or when all else failed. He needed them for the business, or he would have done with only one or two animals. In the off season there was always work or worry.

The men watched a girl, her name was Polly. She and her mother haggled and fussed over a bolt of good red broadcloth. It looked like they were after a few things. Winter was coming and the kids would need shirts and pants and coats for winter, or even school. Polly was a fresh-faced beauty with a hint of a blush in her cheeks, almost as if she was aware of their scrutiny. She had long, straight black hair, with fine pale skin, long curling lashes and big dark eyes looking at everything in the store with an air of serious intent. She stood up straight, and that was one of the things he liked about her. It said much. Out of politeness, Hank took off his most prized possession, a pair of spectacles framed in thin steel wire. He put them in the case to protect them, as they were irreplaceable, and stuck them in his side pocket.

Hank’s purchase wasn’t urgent, but he’d been planning it for some time. Accounts receivable were one thing, and actually collecting them was another. He waited for long months on some accounts. The whole trade was predicated on long turnaround times. When possible, he paid for things in cash, which meant he owed few people and kept what he earned. It just took a little foresight, and he had some of that.

Red went on.

“So far no one’s talked to them.” He looked around, but as long as Peltham was busy, he wasn’t going to get any cartridges, which was what he had ostensibly come in for.

Red could kill a half a day in town on three or four errands. The butter and eggs were running out and he didn’t do that on his own little plot, although he did have a respectable vegetable garden. It was something he was good at, and he could at least walk away from it, for a few days at a time, to go hunting or if some kind of work came up.

He sold cabbages and other produce at the end of the year, and Hank always looked him up as turnips and such kept pretty good over the winter. Red waxed them up real good.

Hank studied Polly. Women were as scarce as hen’s teeth around these parts and she looked to be getting close to marrying age. He thought about it from time to time, her and one or two others. He fantasized about a few other ones, married as they were and so unattainable except in a daydream…at his present age of forty or thereabouts, it was pretty much all fantasy.

Red cleared his throat.

“You’re pretty close to Marjorie’s Way.”

Drifting.

Hank nodded.

“It’s about two and a half kilometres from my place.” It was to the north of his homestead, the sides of the hills and banks were very steep along there.

The valleys ran all east and west. The hollows were full of scrub and there was no easy way through, so he hardly ever went up there. It was easier to get there from town, as the northeast trail ran through from here. They might even be camped on a corner of his land. Not that it mattered, they could do little harm as the first grass fire season was over and the land was lush and surprisingly damp this year. The odds were they would move on. Cold grey clouds had dominated the weather for weeks.

Drifters were nothing new. One heard stories of course.


End of Excerpt.

Working Title: (Not too sure.)

A nice, quiet little science fiction story. Oh, yeah, and some romance in there as well.



Labels, and that little voice in our head.

I am what I am.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about labels. By that I mean the labels we put on ourselves and on others.

Labels bug the hell out of me, for any number of reasons. I really don’t like it when someone sticks a label on me, because it’s always for their own reasons. I may not see the justice in it, or disagree with it strongly or find it insulting.

The worst labels are the ones that justify treating someone different from everybody else.

What brought this on was getting new Twitter followers. You can’t really be on Twitter without a bio. You have to fill in those fields when setting it up.

It is surprising what some people put in those fields—those little labels. We all want to be perceived as unique, and that comes through in the wit, the sarcasm, the facetiousness of some bios . Sameness is drab, and the fact is that we are all special, unique. That’s one thing, and I understand that.

People label themselves ‘nigga’ and I, a ‘white-bread honkey,’ can even understand the point. It is defiance. It is a kind of contempt. It is a statement made for very complex reasons, some of which I don’t get because I haven’t lived that experience…

What about the guy who called himself ‘a piece of shit?’ What about the lady who said ‘I’m a bitch?’

Putting labels on ourselves is stupid, but we do it all the time. Most labels are relatively benign.

“Hi, I’m Dave. I’m an architect. This is my wife Amy. She’s a registered nurse…”

Those labels aren’t causing a lot of harm. It conveys something about who we are and what our social status is. It is a measure of our pride, and solid proof of our hard work and effort. Not all labels are necessarily bad.

Some of them can be limiting.

Someone knocked over a glass and what they said next was kind of revealing.

“It’s okay, I’ve always been stupid…”

Who told you that? That was not my initial impression.

My initial impression was that you had knocked over a glass, and we all do that from time to time.

What happens when you label a girl ‘a slut?’ Then go off and tell everyone else. Doesn’t that sort of label lead to every skanky guy who just doesn’t care to go and hit on her? Aren’t they mostly false and misleading in their statements and treatment in order to get what they want? Don’t they all lie to her to get her to do what they want—to be a slut?

Labels become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

You know, my mother was really impressed with me one day.

What happened was, she introduced me to somebody, I forget who, a realtor or whatever (another label, but you know what I mean,) and the inevitable question arose.

“So, what do you do for a living, Louis?”

“I’m a writer.” That was the first time in my entire life that I had ever said that to someone. More than anything, I want other people to call me a writer. Does that seem strange? I’d give my left nut for some really great writers to say I was a good writer. What other people think of us is surprisingly important, don’t get me wrong on that score.

“I’m a writer.” Notice I didn’t say, ‘crazy as a shit-house rat,’ or ‘mean person,’ or ‘asshole.’

But then, I don’t think of myself that way. Not at all—so the label is clearly inappropriate.

I have never said, upon an introduction, ‘I’m a Caucasian.’ (Sort of self-evident anyway.)

There were a lot of things I didn’t label myself over the years—alcoholic for example.

Oh, I can drink, and I like the feeling of being a bit drunk. I’ve drank out of sheer boredom, I’ve drank to help me go to sleep at night after a long afternoon shift at the fibreglass plant, and I’ve drank socially.

But I never labeled myself an alcoholic.

And when I don’t have any money, I’m not going through withdrawal. I miss it but don’t crave it. Yet you could say I need a beer once in a while.

Labeling me ‘some guy who needs a beer once in a while’ seems rather silly and pointless, as I am sure the reader would agree.

What if you constantly told a kid, ‘You’re no good.’

Wouldn’t they try to live up to that, or at least wouldn’t they find normal reinforcement, just as we all do, when things didn’t work out, or they got into some minor trouble? Wouldn’t everything work out in the end, and as they sat in a jail cell, later in life, wouldn’t it all seem so inevitable?

Wouldn't it appear, at least to them, that they never had a chance? That it was beyond their control?

I’m constantly surprised by the things that parents say to their children.

If someone is trying to label you something bad, don’t wear that label. Pick one out for yourself—and make it a good one.

At Shalako Publishing, we are always challenging assumptions, our own mostly.

That’s a good thing, mostly, for sometimes learning takes a long time. And sometimes it happens in an instant.

I spend a lot of time alone, as you can imagine, and I do a lot of this sort of introspective thinking, but the perspective of other people is vitally important because they see us from outside, which is a completely different perspective.

My mother is a real smart lady. You know what she said?

“The voice we hear most often is our own. It’s with us always, there inside of our heads, and we can’t get away from it. Your brain is the most powerful instrument you will ever have. And it doesn’t control you—that’s a fallacy. You control it…”

She’s a real smart lady, ain’t she? I’m lucky to have her, and don’t I know it.

The point is that other people don’t hear that voice that’s inside my head or yours. They don’t know anything about it.

They make their own observations.

I was thinking about some of my Facebook friends. I won’t just pick a name, but some very respectable people are on that list. I wondered what some of them would say about me, or how they would describe me. For the most part, they seem to tolerate me, or they would drop me, wouldn’t they?

I was surprised by the answers I got—from that little voice in my head. By going outside of myself and taking another look.

It turns out I’m not such a bad guy after all.

Where did I ever get the idea that I was a bad guy?

Every once in a while we should just pick someone out of a crowd and say something nice to them.

Mostly for our own sakes.

Anyhow, thanks for listening.

End

Sensations.

Human beings live in a world of sensation. For much of the time we simply ignore it.

We ignore the kids screaming in the yard, we ignore the pangs of hunger when lunch is an hour away and we have work to do and the boss looking over our shoulder.

We ignore the heat or the cold as best we can, in fact we lock it out of our homes and automobiles. We control those sensations to some degree.

Many of our sensations don’t even register on our consciousness. Closing my eyes due to the shampoo and turning a hundred and eighty degrees in the shower, was really the only time today when I considered my sense of balance, and a marvelous thing it is, too. Fighter pilots, in the peak of health and with all kinds of physical conditioning report that vertigo, the loss of the sense of balance and the well-being that it brings is not only terrifying but uncontrollable—they have to fight to focus on their instruments and take it on pure faith that the readings are true and credible, for their body tells them otherwise.

If someone offered you a piece of chocolate cake, and you put it in your mouth and it tasted awful, what would you do? Would you eat it anyway? I mean, it looks like cake and everything.

Your taste buds would trump your vision in this particular case, wouldn’t they? No matter how good it looks or even smells—your eyes don’t have to chew it up and swallow it, do they?

We trust our sensations, we rely on them.

I rode my bike to the beach today. With no major anxieties going on right now in my personal life, it was good to focus on those sensations exclusively—no raking over old coals, no over-analyzing what so and so said, no deep worries about what people think.

The waves lapped at the shore, children screamed and hollered in the distance. The air was hot and the water was cool. The sand felt gritty between my toes. Seagulls squawked and cardinals sang in the trees behind me. A bunch of moths have hatched out recently, possibly the oak-savannah environment has something to do with it, and the little buggers were brushing up against me as the wind dried me. I stood in the shade, for the sand was too hot for my feet and I’ve had enough sun for a couple of days. The western horizon was chock full of cumulus clouds and the sky over Lake Huron was pure oxygen-blue and I drank water that was still cool, with just a hint of plastic flavour from my water bottle and sucked tobacco smoke into my lungs.

There are other sensations. The sense of well-being, of being fed, of having a full belly or a bed to sleep on. The sense of injustice or hate, or anger, is a kind of physical sensation because it brings physical effects along with it.

We like the feeling of excitement when watching football, hockey or an auto race, we like the suspense or tension of baseball and golf.

Since I came into this world, I have experienced love, hate, desire, disgust, loneliness, friendship, pain, orgasm, terror and triumph. I have enjoyed or suffered the whole gamut of emotions that humans can feel.

It’s got its ups and downs, no doubt about it, but it’s just a whole helluva lot better than feeling nothing at all.

Enjoy your lives as best you can, for life is short and there is nothing that comes afterwards.

Don’t waste your time here. Do something with it.

I wrote this naked. For one thing, my shorts are still wet, and for another, I have this other sense, probably my best one: a sense of humour.

Hopefully you do too, but if not, I pity you, for surely you must be among the most miserable of men.

Now go on, get out of here. Go out and play or something.

Garage Sale.

Ildar Sagdejev (Specious.) > Wiki.

Suzie Caruthers sat in the family’s den, allegedly her den but for the heaps of laundry in baskets and Rex’s files from work which he’d been promising to go through and dispose of. Cardboard banker’s boxes lined all available floor space, so he had at least gotten that far.

She had been meaning to get around to creating some system, for they had heaps of Christmas cards. Suzie thought it would be nice to pull them out next year. It would make the job of finding names and addresses easier, especially if she kept a rubber band around each year and kept them all in one place.

“I know.” Aunt Muriel’s cookie tin would be just the thing.

Up until now it had been entirely useless.

Kicking around the house for years, a gift of course, the blue and gold metal box had decorative flowers on the lid. She’d been meaning to use it for herbal teas or something. Counter space was at a premium in their kitchen and she’d never gotten around to it.

It would have to be in the back of the bottom kitchen cupboards or maybe up on top somewhere. She kept big juice pitchers and stuff that wouldn’t fit anywhere else on top of the cabinets. It was just a waste of space otherwise. It wasn’t for display—it was all very utilitarian and you couldn’t really see much up there anyway.

The slender thirty-six year-old mother of three left the den in its turmoil and went looking for the cookie tin as it should probably hold a couple of big bundles and it was about the right size.

She spent ten minutes pulling open cupboards, closing them, and opening them up to check again, finally looking under the sink. Suzie tried to recall when she’d last seen it.

Going out into the living room where Rex was firmly planted in his armchair, reading all the Sunday papers and making a fine mess of her coffee table, she asked him.

“Have you seen Aunt Muffy’s cookie box?”

“Huh?” His mouth opened and his head swung and he stared at her.

The look of pure bewilderment on his face was priceless, and then she burst out laughing and had to explain it all right from the beginning.

***

Alison Martin, a nine-to-fiver down at the Monolith Insurance company head office, one of the town’s major employers and not far from the health center where she worked out almost religiously two or three times a week, pointed triumphantly at the top shelf of the oaken wall unit on the far end of her mostly brass and glass living room.

The thing was jammed with books, hard-covers on the lower shelves and paperbacks on the upper three layers, all romance writers Bill had never cared for. There was a cleaner spot on the shelf and she just knew she hadn’t moved it.

“What, what?” She was always going on about something.

“Justice is gone!”

He threw the financial section down in disgust.

“Alison. What in the hell are you talking about?”

It all came out in a rush and he wondered if she’d had her noon pill yet. She was such a good woman and he still loved her, still found her surprisingly good in bed after all these years.

“My little bronze figure—remember, the scales went up and down and stuff like that?”

Bill got up and gravely took her in his arms.

“Uh, not really.”

Apparently she was referring to a small bronze figure of a well-known Roman goddess, complete with working scales, the scales of justice, something that had uncomfortably suggested drug deals and illicit cash to Bill, but he’d never mentioned that. Their house wasn’t that kind of place.

***

Belinda Davies had a list of gripes.

“And that’s not the only thing.”

Brad Davies held her and tried to get to the bottom of what was really bothering her.
Their reflection, ghostly in the hallway mirror, mocked him in its enigmatic reflection of his tired, shopworn face and her back, and long red hair. She was a bit lumpy around the hips and thighs but she was all paid for and had a lot of good miles in her yet.

“No, what else, honey?” She’d been pretty good lately, but a relapse wasn’t unheard of in times of stress, although he couldn’t think of anything major in their lives presently.

Her distant cousin Sheela’s wedding couldn’t have anything to do with it, if anything it gave her purpose, something to look forward to and even meddle in. But Belinda had always been special. Her vulnerable neediness had appealed to him as a somewhat stodgy sophomore without a date, and, in the end, he really couldn’t have been happier.

Every family had some kind of a problem. Theirs had several.

“I can’t seem to find my meat grinder.”

Meat grinder. Meat grinder. Then Brad recalled.

“Oh, yes, the meat grinder.” He thought for a moment. “And you can’t find it?”

There was nothing unusual with that, not in this house, not with two teenage boys walking off with all of his tools all the time and never putting them back. He’d taken to keeping all the good stuff at work, where his job box was permanently locked and off-limits in terms of lending and borrowing. When he needed something, he brought it home in his lunch bucket and did whatever little job he had to do. Then he took it back to work.

“I could have sworn it was there just a month or so ago. It was in the back of the end drawer, by the back hallway.’

Belinda had bought the meat-grinder for twenty-five dollars at some garage sale and a long-suffering Brad had clamped down hard on his tongue and said not a thing about it. He knew the odds of her actually using it to grind meat were infinitely small. The grinder was all cast iron, or possibly aluminum, shiny and grey, and it clamped onto the end of a table or something. You fed in chunks of meat and turned a big handle and voila, you had ground meat for making meatballs or meatloaf.

Brad pondered the significance of all this. It seemed just so unlikely to turn out well. Every once in a while Belinda started looking through recipes in magazines, asking him over and over again what he thought of this, and that, and the other, and then look out.

“Well. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. Why don’t you just go to the market if you need some, ah, ground pork, or lamb or something.”

She looked at him uncertainly.

There was no trace of sarcasm, and now, she realized, he would probably be expecting something good for supper.

“Never mind.” It’s just that it was right there, right in the back of that last kitchen drawer, only now it wasn’t.

It was gone, for all intents and purposes vanished into thin air, and no one cared to wonder why.

As for her husband’s innermost thoughts, they were perhaps a bit clearer than he might have known, which only tended to irritate Belinda further.

But that bloody meat-grinder had to be somewhere.

***

They were proceeding east down Pine Street in the Toyota, having just left the three-way stop at the intersection with Empire Circle, when Belinda grabbed Brad’s shoulder and bellowed in his ear, her stabbing arm pointing off to the left through the windshield.

“Stop! Stop the car!” Her voice was shrill and commanding, like some termagant in a TV commercial but she really wasn’t like that and it really must be an emergency.

He couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary in a quick sweep where she was pointing…

Brad jammed on the brakes wondering what the problem was, although there were a lot of parked cars and people moving about…some sort of garage sale going on at that address, and yet there were no kids or dogs or people in the street. Mystified, he turned to inquire politely just what exactly was up and why was she yelling?

His wife whipped off her seatbelt, threw open the door, and as Brad stared in some oddly objective fascination, nipped around the front end of the vehicle, and she charged over there into that crowd of people and started yelling. He threw the car in park and went after her on sheer reflex, rather than any strong desire to get involved.

She was his wife, he loved her dearly, and something was up, mostly likely with her.

He’d been dreading this for some time. It was like things were going too well in the last couple of months or so.

With a deep sigh, Brad stepped up to the better half and gently tried to catch her elbow, which she flung off without a glance and then she lunged for the other woman, who, as a sick sense of what was going on settled over Bill, was clutching a cast-iron meat-grinder for all her stout arms were worth. Both ladies were screaming and shouting and the language coming out of his wife was distinctly troubling in front of all these nice people.

“Honey! Honey! Let’s not make a scene here.”

***

Sergeant Ed O’Herlihy stood by the back end of the cruiser as Patrol Officer Angie Marrietta recounted her observations. Real trouble in this upscale suburban neighbourhood was unusual, although people always had concerns. This looked like one big mix-up and not much more.

“So you were just talking to the caller when this other woman steps up?”

“Yes. Mrs. Caruthers She says she thinks this other thingy belongs to her—some kind of brass figure. It’s like Lady Justice or something. She swears it’s a carbon-copy of one that went missing from her bookshelf.” That one wasn’t really insisting on charges, but it helped to build a picture.

“So what do we have?” The idea of the homeowner, Steve Maynard, a Navy vet with an artificial leg, pensioned off for thirty years, going around burgling homes for knick-knacks and bric-a-brac seemed a bit far-fetched, and yet murder had been committed for fifty cents or a pack of smokes in some places.

Those places were some ways off, but you never knew.

“All right, let’s have a word with the man.” Sergeant O’Herlihy went up to Officer Marrietta’s cruiser and she opened up the door and stood aside with her hand on her weapon.

“So. What’s going on here, sir?”

Turns out Mister Maynard was hopping mad and had a vocabulary that was extensive.

***

After being held all night and going before a judge, Steve Maynard vehemently denied theft and insisted he’d bought all of the items in question. It turned out there were a lot more than just two suspicious items on those tables when bystanders and passers-by really started looking. He said he’d bought them all at garage sales.

The crowd jeered when they heard that. It’s a good thing they had backup, two more cruisers rolling up at just that instant settling the crowd of early-morning garage-sale shoppers right down.

It was a small town.

It was like the crime of the century around here. They just wanted to be helpful. They were being tough on crime. The moral stance was easy enough, but opportunities were few and far between.

It seemed half the people in town were sort of missing things, small things, and the sergeant himself had been a bit perturbed to find a gnarly old wooden lamp, broken, needing a new socket assembly and a shade perhaps, and it would be as good as new. That lamp looked awfully familiar. It was the spitting image of one he’d had in the recreation room for ages. The last time he’d seen it, it was maybe sitting on the end of the workbench in his two-car garage, just waiting for inspiration.

To go out and buy a shade and a new socket was a low priority, but undoubtedly he would get around to it one day.

Could it be?

When the sergeant called home and had his wife look in the garage, she told him a bit breathlessly over the phone that she couldn’t find it. But the garage was a mess and the lamp disassembled. He settled for thinking it could be there. It could be that she just didn’t recognize it.

“Honey, have we ever had a garage sale?”

It turned out they had, last summer or the summer before, she thought. All of this was pretty inconclusive, as the sergeant wouldn’t put it past her or Jinny, his fourteen year-old daughter and very snarky she was these days, to put that out on a table, in all cynicism, and try and get fifty cents for it. Why not, after all? It was just a piece of junk. The fact that his father once told him he had carved that in high school wood-working shop would mean nothing to them, would it?

Someone was claiming some crummy old wooden cigar box was theirs, and another person was looking through all their old photo albums, hoping to identify a maple end table, with a broken leg re-glued in an amateur fashion and with knife gouges in the top made by someone’s undisciplined child, perhaps the previous owner…

The sergeant sighed.

With a bit of luck they would get a murder or a big bank robbery, or something, any day now and then they could quietly drop the whole thing.

Otherwise, it looked pretty bad for old Maynard.

All in the name of justice, they would run him through the meat grinder.

The sergeant drummed his fingers on the desk top and looked at his coffee, already going cold.

He had the luxury of time, and a good dose of discretion. He would think on it.

For no particular reason, the sly look on Maynard’s face when leaving with his lawyer, released by the judge on his own recognizance, kind of bothered him. He couldn’t really say why, it was just an impression.

The words of a familiar nursery rhyme came to him. He’d sung it to his own daughter often enough.

“With a knick-knack, paddy-whack, give the dog a bone. This old man came rolling home…”

In the quiet background hum of the station, a small shiver went up and down his spine and the hairs prickled on the back of his neck.

Three more years until early retirement.

He rubbed his eyes and looked blearily over the squad-room through his glass partition.

Small evil lurked in small places. He mustn’t forget that. A cop could never forget that.

Right about then the sun went behind a cloud, his office seemed dimmer and it was like the temperature dropped three or four degrees—just enough to be a little spooky.

Ah, well. Maybe they’d get their murder after all.



END



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Writing: Short Story versus the Novel.

Sometimes I drive around thinking about stuff.

There are differences in writing the short story versus the novel.


The most obvious difference is sheer length. However, if you can write a good, stand-alone short story, then you can certainly write a good chapter. The chapter allows more leeway, not less, because you have all the stuff that went before, and all the stuff that comes after. It might have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but it’s not so final—not until you get to the end of the book.

Assuming you write twenty or so chapters, each of four to six thousand words, you’ve got yourself a good first draft of a novel, at least in terms of sheer word count.

A good first draft takes me anywhere from two to three months to write. That takes care of the plot and the characters to some degree. I need to get to the ending before I begin to feel really comfortable with the thing as a totality.

Usually it’s around sixty thousand words. Re-writing usually makes it a bit longer, and yet I’m always paring words out as I go. With luck, I manage a thousand words a day for two or three months. Some days might not see any work at all, and on other days I might manage two or three thousand words. The thing has to be making progress to be motivating.

It’s not hard to write a thousand words a day. It takes about an hour, sometimes even less. First, you need to know what the next scene is.

You can’t write it if you can’t imagine it, seeing enough of the basic movements and settings, clearly in your head. I spend a fair amount of time thinking about what comes next. I know where I’m going tomorrow when I sit down to write. My current novel is up to eighteen thousand words right now, and it’s my eleventh novel.

(Other than that, I have no real qualifications for speaking on such matters.)

A novel has to have some kind of compelling climax and a satisfying ending. When I begin a novel, I often don’t know exactly how it all turns out.

Working at a thousand words a day gives me time to figure that out, and work towards that end point.

When writing a short story, I can’t even begin to write the thing until I figure out the ‘gag.’ Once I have a gag, the structure reveals itself and works itself out.

I have to know the ending. In that sense it’s easier structurally. All the rest of the novel is left out of a short story. I say that because any good story can be made longer. I have short stories that arguably should be made into novels. Why I abandon them, is a very good question. That one I think is purely intuitive—they simply didn’t grab me by the guts and refuse to let go until I did the work and got it out of my system.

Another major difference is simple time. I wrote a seven thousand word short story over the weekend. It took two and a half days. It’s already submitted. There is the satisfaction of coming up with an idea, working with it, solving the problems and then completing it. There is that quick gratification with writing short stories. You write them and submit them and hope for the next good idea to come to you as soon as possible.

Making a submission is a fairly positive moment.

Right now I have probably a dozen, pretty strong short stories under submission in pro and semi-pro markets. As long as you’re writing new material and resubmitting as soon as a rejection slip comes in, that part of the business is relatively easy to maintain. Read the guidelines and keep track of your submissions. If you get even the silliest idea, write it up, polish it, and submit.

See what happens, and repeat as necessary.

As for writing a novel, the motivation, the urge must be sustained over a longer term. It takes enthusiasm generated over the long haul. There may be no real clear idea of where it is headed for the first twenty or thirty thousand words. You may have no idea of who the people are until they begin to react to each other in their own voices and their own characteristic way. It happens on the page as you write it. There is spontaneity in the novel. It just takes longer to write one.

In order to submit or self-publish a book, first you have to write one, and complete it, and polish it until all doubts are removed insofar as that is possible.

No one can teach you how to write or tell a story. It is a journey of discovery. If we want it bad enough, we will learn. We teach ourselves. Ultimately, we’re all alone out here.

You learn a lot about yourself as you go along.

 

End