Thursday Thoughts

As I've mentioned before, I use the backburner of my brain a lot.  I tend to work best when I give stories time to simmer on their own, with just the occasional stir ... and I'll stop there, because otherwise the culinary metaphor is going to become laboured.

But it works even better when I don't just idle in between, instead working on a different project.  I found out the hard way some years ago that two novels wasn't a good idea simply because I ended up in a never-ending editing sequences, but short fiction and poetry is definitely an excellent change of pace.

So a bit late, and I've already missed one month, but I'm resolving to write a short story a month for the rest of the year.  Length is no object - if I have an idea for a piece of microfiction, that's perfectly valid.

So February's story is Stone Unturned, about a historian who specializes in "Soundings" - summoning visions of the past through prayer and song.  It's intended for the Fantasy-Writers.org monthly challenge, which is to write a story including these five elements:  a child, a journey, a betrayal, a bird and a deserted building.  I always tend to take FWO challenges and add an additional, personal level of difficulty - my intention with this one was to have all the elements in both the past and the present, but I believe I'm just short of this ...

As far as this blog is concerned, this project will also give me more opportunity to share the occasional tidbit, as Unnatural Causes has already reached the point where most segments would either require extensive explanation, be "spoilers" for the plot, or both.