Returning from my Hiatus

Poor Picture quality but that face 

We’ve reached the other side of my annual November blog hiatus.

Was I successful in my NaNoWriMo endeavors?

The short of it … no.

I made my word count consistently for the first week, and then it all took a tumble.

It was one of those situations where you wanted to do everything but the thing you committed to.

Was it a total failure?

No.

I finished a short story, finally, that I’d been working on for about a year. I’m excited to see readers’ responses after I do an initial edit (if any reader is interested in being a short story guinea pig, don’t be shy, let me know.)

Since I wasn’t writing as I should’ve been for NaNo, I got some other things sorted out.  Including some exciting things on the horizon for a friend and me that combines our love of reading and cooking. Stay tuned.

I started working full time, more than full time now. It’s still from home, but there’s human-to-human interaction on a daily basis now. Yay me!

I also bought a new vehicle. My Malibu was reaching the end of its very prolonged, slow death. Like any good car owner, I decided to abandon it in favor of a shiny, quiet, black Chevy HHR.

Car aficionados out there are shaking their head at my choice. Of all the options, why go with something judged so poorly in the car world?

The answer comes in three points:

1)   It was cheap

2)   It doesn’t sound like a motorcycle gang driving down the road

3)   If it runs good, which it does, I’m on board since it meets the first two criteria

Naturally, one progresses from car buying to house buying. So, we’re now traveling down that road.

November … A lot of stuff crammed into 30 days.

December: Christmas goodness and prepping for a very, very busy 2015.

A 2015 without our family dog, Zack. Rest in Peace. 

Short Story Love

 

My well loved short story collections. 

In honor of the start of Camp NaNoWrimo and my endeavor to write a short story anthology, I thought I’d point you toward some short stories available online that have left a mark on me as a reader/writer.

As an English graduate, short stories were my bread and butter during my academic days. In some ways, I learned to love short stories more than I do novels. All texts, whether 1,000 words or 100,000 words, require a level of bravery and talent to leave any kind of mark on the world, but I think a short story has a lot of work to do in a very limited space that gives them a certain appeal unobtainable by longer novels.

If a short story can elicit some kind of visceral emotion from me within their short pages, I hold them to a different level than I would a novel that did the same. There is no room for background, slow building, or space to grow a strong bond between reader and text in a short story. It’s all action, and if done right, powerful, lasting action.

—That’s not to say I don’t love full-length novels. I’m a reader of all—

I’ve fallen in love with many short tales, but these are my favorites:

Leaf by Niggle by J.R.R. Tolkien

            If you read any on this list, let it be this one. It has Christian undertones, some might say overtones, like most of Tolkien’s work, but it’s also simply a story about people, about appreciating your neighbor and looking at the world through their eyes. It’s also about an artist, a pastor, death, and a leaf.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursela K. Le Guin

This one had me in a moral quandary. If you’re a lover of Utopian/Distopian stories, give this short one a read and decide what you would do. It’s about a perfect society, what is responsible for that perfection, and what one would do in the face of that thing which makes it perfect. I’m writing in circles, just give it a read.

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

            Another moral quandary story. This is about a town that holds a lottery once a year as a ritual to bring prosperity to the town. I won’t tell anymore, but it’s definitely worth a read.

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

            This is about a sick woman who is locked away in a house in the country at the advise of her husband to help her get better. Strange things happen in her isolation and the ending is just creepy perfection. Read it.

Honorable Mentions:

Rappaccini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Gift of the Magi by O.Henry

The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka