I’m currently working on a book of short stories. Used as I am, to writing novels that hover between the 50-90k word count, I struggled at the beginning of the project.

With a full length novel, I write with relative abandon, knowing that I have 90k worth of word arsenal at my disposal to develop my characters, flesh out the plot and build my way up to a good-sized novel.

There is no such luxury with short stories. The prose is lean, each word laden with taut emotion, calculated to hit with a precision envied by assasins.

Before starting the short story project, I entered a few short story competitions. By my third entry, I’d gone from bemoaning the word limit (2,000) as a limiting exercise to telling the story well under the prescribed word count. 

This morning, I took a peek at my next project (word count: 100,000).

All those words…where are they supposed to come from?