I need to finish this short story I’ve been working on so that I can go back to focusing on a novel.
I love writing short stories… but you can’t lean on them the same way as a novel. While writing a novel, that world and those characters are there for you the whole time.
With short stories, you flit from one setting and set of characters to the next. It’s fun. But when writing is both your “career” and — more fundamentally — your method of handling anxiety, at least for me, I need more stability right now than I can get from short stories.
I’ve had the outline for this dinosaur short story sitting in my inbox (I email ideas to myself) since February 2018. It kept getting bumped by novels with (sort of) deadlines. So, now I can afford the time to focus on a random short story, and I really want to get it done…
But it’s hard to concentrate with the world on fire (literally and figuratively with plagues), and I just need to wrap up this story about humans (and also dinosaurs, but not anthro ones) so that I can get back to keeping Trugger and Kipper foremost in my mind.