My partner is on the faculty of a low-residency MFA program (she's a poet), and the next two weeks are her residency. I'm hanging out here for the first week - I'll go to craft talks, go to readings, and in between those, and a little bit of work, I'll be writing again.

I'm excited to be doing that - to get a chance to immerse myself again in my writing, and create whatever is next on my writing path. I have a few different places that I'd like to go, and I'd like to spend a little bit of time trying my hand at something that I've thought for a while I can't do - writing short stories.

I love writing (or thinking about) novels. Big sweeping plot lines, complex intertwining storylines, I love all of the space I get in a novel - all of the wide open pages to roam and ramble, and spin out a long story. The short story seems to me too confining. And I don't feel like I have the ability to come up with truly interesting endings - a way to wrap up a story at the same time as you leave space for questions.

But I'm going to try. I feel like writing short stories is a way to hone my craft in a way that will be useful, and can get lost in a novel. I need work on sentences and the use of words. I need work on filling out fully details in scenes. I need work on character development. So it feels like writing short stories will exercise those muscles.

And it's fun to be around writers, even though they are literary (said with a slightly ironic British accent) rather than sci-fi/fantasy writers. So far, though, they all seem to think that writing sci-fi is fun (which, of course, it is).