A Writer's Notebook, Day One-Thousand-One-Hundred-And-Ninety-Nine

I have a number of short stories that I think are good, but I am never as confident with my fiction as with my poetry.  In part it is that I know my stories tend to be a bit strange.  A lot of the times I worry about whether the endings are satisfying, as many times they are intentionally not conclusive.  I don't believe you have to provide complete closure that simplifies a story into ultimate finality, but it is not always easy to make such an ending work to make the story feel finished.  As well, I know that I often am playing unexpected games with structure or language, attempting something that pushes me into spaces that feel new.  One story, for example, takes the form of a defensive online rant, but attempts to do it without ever offering the details of the underlying event, instead relying on the character, pointing towards the kind of manipulative logic they are employing.  I do not know if it works as a story, but I am quite proud of it, even just as an experiment, and I am interested to find out what others think of it.  At the moment, I think I have about seven or so stories of varying lengths that are complete and a few more that are still unfinished, some of which I may never finish.  I think I am getting better at producing fiction, though I don't do it with the same frequency as poetry.  I would like to be more consistent in this area of my writing, working on it, if not every day, at least regularly.  I am thinking, though, that I want to get a bit more guidance with the work itself.  I am less assured in my fiction, having not had as many opportunities to work on it with others and never having had a great deal of instruction in this area.  Perhaps that has been an advantage, has allowed me to develop my own ideas about stories, but I think it might be helpful, right now, to seek out a bit more guidance.

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