short-story

It’s a truth, that some writers, like steam trains, take more than a few yards to really get going.

I’ve tried my hand at short stories, tales under 10,000 words, and failed at EVERY attempt.

The Sorcerer’s Apprentice – this was my best attempt at a short story. I got a beginning middle and end down all under the magic number.

The story ended because we’d killed the characters – it was tragic, it was also beautiful. And then I thought to myself ‘what happens next,’ ‘what if the end is only the beginning,’ and again what was once so promising is now somewhere in its early thirties…

Not that all is indeed lost, I have once (yes just once) managed the keep the word count under 2,000 to describe A Working Man (a door-to-door psycho killer) – the joy that is Flash Fiction.

However, one swallow does not a summer make.

Point of all this?

Word counts aren’t an attempt to dumb down books for the scrolling social media generation, but they are something I struggle with.

I blether.

I add colour.

I love telling the tale, telling all of it in wonderful 4KHD, but in doing so I fall too far outside the accepted norms.

Speculative Fiction/Fantasy is the most forgiving genre – you’re allowed to pad it out to ‘world build,’ but even then, the hard stop is 120,000.

That wouldn’t be too bad if I were writing such, but I’m not.

Thrillers/Commercial Fiction, these bad boys have a limit of 90,000 with a strong preference towards 80,000.

By any estimate I’m quite possibly some 40,000 words over the limit.

It’s not an edit, it’s a cull, a murder of the innocents, a blood letting on a truly barbarous scale that is required – and I’m not the man do to do it.

Some skills I have, some I do not.

What will the editor do?

I don’t know.

He’s been employed; coin has been given.

I’ve had a colourful life thus far, but the nervous tension I feel while my work is away being edited is something new and most definitely unpleasant.

This is my first foray, and they say you always remember your first – learn a lot too.

Our timeline has the next milestone mid-January 2026 – we must wait, we must be patient and we must endure. Here we stand, we can do no other…

Stay safe, remain sane, hug those you love, tell them too.

That little icon, it’s so inviting, just one last hit for old times’ sake, just one trip round the world, you can control it, you know what you’re doing…

DELETE.

It’s almost an involuntary action, open your phone, click on icon of choice, dribble down chin, become angry/frustrated at the world, loose two and a half hours and have nothing to show for it afterwards. You don’t feel better, you’re not better informed on world events, you’re not better by any objective measure.

So, you haven’t’ picked up your phone, it’s not ringing so why are you looking at it?

The realisation that your phone isn’t a vital appendage is groundbreaking and liberating. If someone wants to talk to me it will ping or ring, if it’s silent then leave it alone – do something else!

We’ve been reading – oh the joy, the remembered pleasure of the written world taking you on an adventure. Currently I’m in Belfast witnessing the battle between a recurring evil and a young woman trying to stop this serial killer – and it’s good.

I’m also when not reading, typing away – purging my own imagination.

The latest missive started as an opening line. A man sitting on a pavement café in Sardinia, who is just watching the end of a day:

So little liquid, so much potential compressed into it. It had gone cold, but he still sipped absentmindedly at his expresso. People came; people went. Life’s rich tapestry was a slowly changing tableau to his front. He watched but seemed to follow little. He should have been paying rapt attention, but he wasn’t. He was a middle-aged man in a nondescript jacket and open neck shirt sitting in a Sardinian pavement café drinking coffee. He was sat alone, which for this café was unusual, he also had no open laptop, newspaper, or mobile phone competing for his attention, and that if noticed would have struck any viewer as strange.

But nobody appeared to paying attention to anything. Everything was slow, mañana personified. The sun was lazily sinking into the sea, the fishing boats half-heartedly bobbing with the lackadaisical tide, even the evening breeze moved with all the speed of a sulking teenager…

And good bad or indifferent this little section of prose helped pull me from the abyss that took two and a half hours of my life every day.

I’m a pantster by trade and I’ve literally no idea where this tale is going, except it is going to Vegas because that town has always fascinated me.

Lots of tall tales have migrated towards Vegas, and HIM is no different. We don’t know who he is, or indeed why THEY are after him, and importantly neither does he.

HIM is my post social media project. A dalliance into writing a short (10,000) word story. So far, it’s working.

Oh, the tale we are weaving and the fun we are having – Intrigue, murder and a kind-hearted prostitute who doesn’t want or need rescuing.

So, point of this missive.

Time is the stuff of life, you only have so many breaths/heartbeats etc. You can spend two and a half hours every day doing something you don’t really enjoy, or you can delete the app and do something else.

As a child (age spoiler) I remember a TV show imaginatively called – Wdyjsoytsagadslbi?: Why don’t you just switch off your television set and go and do something less boring instead?

Maybe the folk in the late 1970’s weren’t too far off the mark?

Stay safe, remain sane AND Wdyjsoytsagadslbi?

Telling Tall Tales

Short Stories and Shorter Attention Spans

Pavlov’s dog goes to Vegas.