Monday, I went searching through my Google Docs folders for a particular short story I wrote about 6 years ago. (I eventually found it but it wasn’t in my Docs, it was buried in my Gmail. I’ve now moved it to an appropriate folder.) On my way through the archives, going back even just two years, I found about half a dozen unfinished short stories. Apparently, I am very good at starting stories but suck at the follow through.
Source: youmustcreate.bigcartel.com via Cheryl on Pinterest
I found stories I’d started about a magical cat, a courier in post-quake Victoria, a dinner party that goes horribly off the rails, the lonely existence of an efficiency expert, and several others. I found the novel I’d started in 2006, based on the short story about a particularly heartless civil servant that prompted this search and another novel I started about a girl who gets her birthday wish and has to deal with it (really, that one is likely a novella). And of course there is still Undead, unfinished, plus oodles of poetry, postcard fiction, and pages of story ideas tucked away in there.
I’m not really the least bit surprised that there are unfinished stories kicking around; I’ve blogged before about my propensity to get ideas and to start projects but not finish them. What did surprise me was that I had completely forgotten writing some of them.
The good news is, I have a lot of material I can use to build up my Kindle ebooks & singles offerings. My goal is to have a half dozen items in my store by July. I will likely take some of the shorter fiction pieces and knit them together into an anthology then finish some of the longer pieces to build it up. Either that or I’ll just start something new.
I hear that…