Meme Stolen From Many, But Mostly From gnomi

[mabfan]

I rarely do memes, but if gnomi is doing it...

Ahem.

"The problem with LJ: We all think we are so close, but really we know nothing about each other. So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

"Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you."

Comments

[eimarra]

Why short stories and not novels?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

Some writers naturally gravitate to the novel, others to the short story. When I started out, I found that my natural language for writing fiction was the short story, and so I kept honing my craft on shorter works. Eventually, I learned how to write longer stories, and I'm now at the point where I find it difficult to write a story under 10,000 words. As for novels, I've written one complete unpublished novel, which failed to sell, and I've got a second one written which I think will need more work before it's ready to go out the door.

[eimarra]

Thanks. So did the ideas become more complex with time, or simply your facility for working with them?

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

I think it's a little of both. What happened was that I started to realize how to turn an idea into a novel, by first outlining another novel and getting a feel for what went into a more complex story. (That novel, by the way, was The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer.)