short stories

We just returned from a fantastic extended weekend trip up to the mountains, to Bolzano, near the Austrian border.  It’s very different from the Tuscan hill towns we’re now accustomed to – lots of German food, lots of German words, and most significantly, mountains!  Mountains everywhere.  It was absolutely gorgeous.  We took a day trip up to the mountain town of Siusi and then a cable car up into the Dolomites where my California babies saw snow for the first time, and made actual snowballs!

Taking the weekend off meant a lot of catch up work, and falling a little behind on my final edits of the next book, but I’m gettting caught up.  Working on novels takes on an interesting cadence – you have to keep moving or you lose sight of all the strings.  But sometimes I miss short stories, so I was happy when the latest issue of Zahir Tales came online – http://www.zahirtales.com/onate_beta.html  Check out my story – Onate beta.

Advertisement

Idea for Spring Break?

It’s hard to believe we’ve been in Italy for seven weeks now!  I have been so busy with teaching that I haven’t been doing a whole lot of writing, but I think I’m starting to turn a corner.  I’ve been carving out some time during the work week to finesse American Caliphate, my most significant current project.  I have to have it in ship shape to turn into my publisher by the end of May.  And that’s a little scary!  Not that it’s in bad shape, but because it’s epic and long, and at just over 100,000 words, it’s 15,000 words longer than the publisher wants.  So I’ve been doing a lot of soul searching as to what back stories can go, and what characters can become less vivid.  And I was nervous about doing this, but the strange thing is that every cut I make is a cut I want to make.  I feel like I’m honing this into something finer.  I have to admit that this is a bit scary, because where does it end?  If I keep going, I’ll either have a hell of a short story, or a truly wonderful sentence!