Friday short story: There isn't one

A few weeks ago, I mentioned that my novel blitz during August might lead to a lack of Friday stories. And I squeezed one out for my anniversary, but reality has now caught up with me. If you want new material, a few of my experimental mock news broadcasts have been going up, along with sundry TV blog posts.

In addition, I’ve churned out this quick blog about the writing process behind these Friday stories. I don’t usually talk about that stuff, so thought it might have novelty value. If this is of no interest to you, stop reading here.

The obvious question is: “Nick, if you have time to write a blog post and record mildly amusing audio, why don’t we have a story?” Well, whoever you are, the main time sink on the Friday efforts is always having an idea. Coming up with something, developing it into a story shape - this can require hours of pacing the house, knocking on stuff, swearing to myself, scaring the cat.

I originally started these as part of the #FridayFlash hashtag on Twitter, a fun game where lots of writers post bursts of fiction on Fridays. Based on my occasional readings of other people’s output, many produce flash snippits shorter than mine, maybe requiring less military planning. A few hundred words, rather than always a thousand or so.

Perhaps if I learned to do this, I wouldn’t need as many breaks. Once again, my inability to be concise is my undoing. I did try a three part serial once, to string an idea out for a while and reduce headbanging time. I succeeded in that regard, but the resultant material just wasn’t that good, so I haven’t repeated the experiment.

Anyway, I hope to return, in September at the latest, when I finish the novel draft and have time to crash my fists into my desk and hurl my notebook against the wall to my heart’s content. As ever, the backlog of stories is available, along with all the new stuff I linked to in the top paragraph.

Thanks for your patience.