short story meme

[swan_tower]

You know what? I think my short-story-producing brain needs a kick in the rump. So I'm going to meme for the first time in a while, with something I picked up by way of yhlee and mrissa.

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got submitted to magazines, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

(Incorporated Mris' edit -- the original phrasing had to do with "posting" stories, because it seems to have started among fanficcers. Also, as per Mris, I make no promises that these won't turn into real stories. In fact, I'm kind of hoping they will.)

Comments

[janni.livejournal.com]

That one about the elves from way back when, from way before you were writing novels with the fae ... I know you've said you think of it as juvenalia and not up to the standards of your later work, and so you never even gave it a title, let alone submitted it ... but I always was secretly fond of the snippets you posted online, and I suspect I wasn't alone in this.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

. . . okay, Janni, how the hell did you get access to my hard drive???

No really. Except for the posting of snippets, THAT BOOK EXISTS.

[janni.livejournal.com]

Clearly, my work here is done.

(We'll be waiting on the snippets ... :-))

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

There will be no snippets. The work is not only juvenilia; it's a blatant rip-off of several other people's work. I'm chiseling off those parts one chip at a time, and may eventually be able to rebuild the setting into something I can write publishable work in, but we aren't there yet.