Pushing my envelope…with geese and stripes

I’ve decided to embark upon a new project…along with all my current ones as Rina Slayter and with Ashleigh Raine.

I’m gonna write some short stuff for a change. Yeah, as half of Ashleigh Raine, I’ve written some stories less than 15k, but I’m talking ultra-short here.

The other day, I was dinking around my files and ran across a great opening sentence (I’d put it here, but then there’d be nothing to discover when the story gets posted) that I’d filed away. It wasn’t going to suit a novel. No way. But flash fic…oh hell yeah.

So I wrote it.

And because I type so fast, I wrote, edited and got through my second draft in about an hour. Another couple passes and I’ll probably end up killing its magic rather than growing it.

That little experiment taught me that while I call myself a novel-writer, I can also write flash. But anything in between and readers will need a clothespin for their nose so they won’t have to smell the crappiness of my work. Funny, huh?

Actually, not really. It took me some hard thinking to figure out how I could possibly write ultra-short so easily. I’d assumed it’d be agony to go from novel down to flash, but really, it wasn’t.

Because I write my books scene by scene. They’re micro-stories in themselves. They don’t stand on their own, but they are mini-stories. Applying that skill, plus the fact that most of my scenes chime in between 1 and 3 thousand words, it’s really not much of a stretch (or in this case shrink) to stay under 1K.

My greatest nemesis at this moment is finding the time to churn these things out. I’m up to my eyeballs in workload and backlog at the moment, but perhaps in the New Year, I’ll have some to post to my website.

I’ve already started a list of story ideas, characters and opening sentences that’d work for ultra-shorts. I can’t wait for a moment to really work on them!

And today marks the first day I’ve gotten the nerve to wear my geese with stripes shirt. I wish I had a camera handy so that I could snag a pic of it and post it to my site. The shirt fits great and there’s geese…and stripes…on polyester. What more could a girl like me ask for?

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