Reaping my Shorts

I dedicated last year to short stories. And now I'm reaping what I sow ..

*On Sunday I'm reading at Story Studio (former Short Fuse) at Komedia. The theme for this night is Tunes so I re-submitted the story I read at the Edge of the Sea Festival in August. The story is called Further North than You and is inspired by the Wedding Present song with the same title. This story will also be included in an anthology with other stories inspired by the Wedding Present titles or lyrics.

*This week I received a copy of Spilling Ink in the post - an excellent anthology of fiction, nonfiction and prose poetry/flash fiction. My short story Lovers of the Planet is one of the featured pieces.

*My short story The Party is Over made it to the shortlist for the annual Mslexia Short Story Competition. Although shortlist in this case doesn't mean it will be one of the published pieces, just that it came close.

This year I haven't written a single short story. Here you can read about my change of scene last year, but now I'm think I'm back to poetry again ... What I learnt from dedicating a year to short stories is that every word and semicolon matters. I've become better at writing in general, yet I don't think of myself as a short story writer. I write novels for a living (well, for a tiny tiny part of my living), I write poetry for fun and for performing (and therefore am not too bothered about semi-colons and perfecting them for the page), but short stories ... They are still beyond me.

How many drafts must a woman write ... before she throws herself off the pier?

I read an interview view Susan Hill in the latest issue of Mslexia. She only ever does one draft of a novel. She goes back to correct, check and edit, but she never rewrites.

I'm totally the opposite, at least when it comes to REPLACING ANGEL, the novel I've been working on since October 2007. My first draft was just a mess of words, me spewing out what I wanted to say. In the second draft I tried to make sense of what I wanted to say, in the third draft I tried to find some kind of plot ... The fourth and fifth drafts were about defining the characters and their motivations. And the sixth draft which I completed a couple of days ago was all about ...

Cutting. 104 000 words became 84 000 words. So you might think that I've spent two intense week in Novelland just deleting words ... but it's not that easy. Cutting also means restructuring, and even adding scenes to make sense of the story. I'm happy with it now, and I'm hoping that I won't have to make more than 8 drafts! There's some interest from an agent, and he was the one who pointed out that the first third of the novel was too slow, hence the cutting ...

What I'm working on right now is the title. REPLACING ANGEL has too many associations to fantasy, Buffy the Vampire etc. As it's more of a gritty realism book I need to find something more appropriate.