After spending months, and then more months, and probably even a couple additional months, finishing off a 20,000 word novella late last year, I felt totally depleted in the writing department, which is weird for me, and thought maybe I should take a break and work on something a little….shorter. And also quicker. So I had way too much fun spending a few weeks dusting off some “oldies but goodies” let’s call them (such as my decade old MFA poetry thesis), getting rid of thousands of words / pages, and ending up with some flash fiction. I wouldn’t often call the editing process “joyful” but it was joyful condensing page after page of text and then realizing wow, without all that baggage, this piece is so much better. Kind of like getting all your hair cut off I suppose. Especially if you were the one doing the cutting.

“Some Time Away,” now up on Tin House’s Open Bar, started off as the 4th story I ever wrote way back in 2003 when I was getting my MFA (in poetry) at Syracuse University. It began as 7,000 words and ended up at 990.

“None of It Was a Hoax,” up on Monkeybicycle, was a good chunk of my poetry thesis from 2004 that I whittled down to 900 words of prose.

“Willing” is in the latest issue (#13) of Midwestern Gothic, coming out April 1. The flash story used to belong in my semi-sci-fi novella I finished up late last year. It was a side tangent about the grandfather who makes questionable ethical decisions that result in the family’s wealth and it touches upon how generation-specific our moral standards are. I worked way too long on it and, in the end, kind of fell in love with it, so when it turned out to have no place in that novella (and I tried putting it everywhere), I turned it into another little flash piece.   

Also, my story “Subtraction” is up on Five Chapters this week, a sprawling sci-fi adventure rather the opposite of flash fiction.  I wrote it during one of my science fiction kicks (and here’s hoping I’ll have one of those kicks again soon–writing literary realism can be so….real. Or something.).

The “story” (the term used wistfully, it is more like another novella) that I’m working on now was supposed to be in the slender and publishable 5,000-8,000 word range, but it’s turned out to be another 20,000 word wooly mammoth. While I love the idea of novella length work, the editing — and I’m a poet at heart, so I spend way too much time on the sentences — takes forever and progress is slow. And there are very few good places who want to publish a piece that length. At times it feels like I am drowning in this “story,” which, I suppose, if you have to drown, isn’t a bad way to go, but still. The lengths of my work seem to go in phases: for a while every story I wrote was 5,000 words. I liked it there. You could complete a story in two months say or maybe three. Then the next year everything I wrote was 8,000 words, which was still okay. But then the following year….I’m hoping this 20,000+ phase will either explode next time into a novel or show some restraint and shrink back to a proper and respectable length.