A Writer's Notebook, Day Seven-Hundred-And-Twenty-Eight

 I completed work on the first draft of the story I have been writing.  I'm not certain about what to begin next, to be honest, but I am glad to be done with this piece.  It is over twenty pages, which is long for a story, but I do not think it quite crosses into the novella length yet.  I want to look at my short stories together and see how much length their is in that collection at the moment.  I do not believe I am at anything close to a book, but I want to consider how long it is and have an idea of what to do with it as a set of stories.  I think it has enough connection in theme, but thinking on the issue of a collection may help me to consider what I want to write next in order to add to the work.  The story I just finished plays with ideas that I also explored in other work, especially my novel, but it takes a very different direction in most every other way.  At present, my biggest concern is whether it all fits together as a piece, since the end is rather odd and their is a shift in the narrative that may seem jarring or unsatisfactory.  I am waiting to see what my first few readers say.

I've also been working on titles for the poems in that new chapbook.  It is going better now.  I spent quite a bit of time going through the work without really connecting to the concepts I was looking to employ, but today I took a different approach and it worked out better.  I think I will be able to put this together soon, and I am hoping to create a piece that is a complete work composed from the poems, and not just a set of writing that is bound together.  In order to do that, I am considering the relationships of the poems to each other, and am using the titles and other elements to create specific connections that carry through the book and create a narrative journey for the reader, though not in a literal sense of a story, more in the way a piece of music can have that sense without the content of the story itself.  I feel quite good about the work I did today, and I am trying to do things to be hopeful. I think it may be that a collection of this sort will have a leg up in getting published, though it is far from certain that will make the difference.

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