Thoughts: The long and the short of it.

I’ve been polishing off a fair few short stories since I had my first couple of acceptances from Xcite Books a few months ago. They’re fun to write. I was going to say quick, but with all the rereading and rewriting I do they actually take quite a while. What they provide is the chance to play around, try different perspectives, quirky scenarios. I’m never short (forgive the pun) of ideas for shorts. And finishing them brings fairly quick gratification.

But I also have a longer work in progress, begun a couple of years ago and lying stagnant in my ‘stuff to work on’ file. I’m starting to think I should set aside a regular slot or two in my week for making progress on this. In terms of pure wordage, I have 15,000. I’m aiming for about 80,000. This is going to take a lot more stamina than a few short stories.

I had started to think at the back of my mind that the whole thing was a bit silly. I guess many writers will empathise with this. You leave a work for a while and your inner critic starts to tell you it’s terrible. Then you reread it with the benefit of a bit of distance and perspective and think, wow, this is hot stuff. 

So now I have to research life on board an eighteenth-century ship. How many people would it take to crew various sizes of vessel? What is the correct terminology for all those masts, sails, bits of rope? How long would journeys to various exotic destinations take from Europe? What would the crew eat and drink? It’s surprising how many facts I seem to know already from some unknown source, but I don’t think I can blag the rest by just reading Hornblower and watching Johnny Depp. That's Ioan Gruffudd above as Hornblower in the telly series, by the way.