Preamble

It’s nice to finish something. When you write novels and your short stories run about 40 pages apiece, it’s hard to feel like you’ve accomplished anything after a writing weekend, whether you write during every day of it or not. I love my novel and I’m learning to shorten up the stories, though not enough to make a single post of anything. The blog is helping a bit; while I never considered myself a writer of personal non-fiction, trying to keep my posts of readable length has kind of forced me into the genre.

But my forte is still fiction (I think). My preference is certainly fiction. I love to write about other people, yet, as I say, it can be darned demoralizing when it takes for-frikking-ever to get anything finished. It gets even worse when a new voice pops into mind and starts making demands. I begin to think Iʼll never get anything done so why bother starting?

Then there are days when that new voice gets so insistent that I start seeing pictures and overhearing conversations from a story I havenʼt conceived of yet. I can feel my right brain swelling with content. It isnʼt painful in the conventional sense, but it is definitely distracting. I literally have to set everything else aside just to get it out of my head.

A couple of months back, I put up a blurb called Café Nuit that was inspired by Adam Hurstʼs cello piece The Midnight Waltz. It was short, fairly sweet, and got pretty good reviews from the faithful. I guess the heroine of the piece was gratified because she came back to me this weekend and bugged me into writing an extension of her story. Granted, it took me a few hours to get it out in first draft. Iʼd hoped to do it in half the time, but it didnʼt need much tweaking so Iʼll take it.

Best of all, it isnʼt that long, so I can put it into a single post! Watch this space – it goes up tomorrow.

Enjoy.