As my resurgence continues, I find myself engaging once more in one of my favorite weekly activities: Short Story Saturday.

I feel that, as a writer, it’s important to diversify: to keep working on a range of projects.  It can be easy, when an idea really takes off, to become tunnel-visioned on one’s work in progress, plugging away at a new novel while neglecting short fiction.  However, even for a novelist, short fiction is important.  From the career-building standpoint, it’s a way to keep generating content, putting oneself out there, and is certainly easier to shop around and publish than a complete novel.  From the craft standpoint, I’ve found it’s key to refining my writing, and growing as a writer.  Often, I’ve used my short fiction to challenge myself: to write things I don’t normally write, especially things I don’t typically write well.  When I neglect my short fiction writing, my writing in all manners tends to suffer.  I’ve found this is not a coincidence.

So, each week I try to set aside a little time to work on short fiction.  Here’s what I was up to this week:

Ganymede

As with many of my short fiction pieces, this one began as a daily sketch, but it’s become one of my pet projects.  Taking place within the time frame of my current work in progress, Ganymede follows the exploits of Doctor Paolo Denilson, a Brazilian researcher assigned to Earth’s first expedition on the eponymous Jovian moon.

The story begins roughly 24 hours after Paolo’s light aerial vehicle crashes near the center of the Memphis Facula, forcing him to abandon the wreckage and proceed to the edge of the facula on foot.

Ganymede is but one of a growing number of short fiction pieces I’ve been working on lately in an effort to flesh out and better understand the world I’ve created for my new novel.  In science fiction, world-building is vitally important: it’s the framework upon which each story is built.  For something to richly detailed and firmly rooted in science as Pathfinder, it’s crucial that I understand that framework very, very well.  Hopefully, these stories will give me a better idea of what life is like for everyday humans in 2094.

The Spaceman

This was one I hadn’t looked at in a while.  The Spaceman puts a twist on the typical alien story.  Here, a family of avian creatures find a crashed spacecraft on their farm, and rescue the surviving human inhabitant.

The Spaceman is one of my longest-running unfinished projects, partly because it’s grown into possibly the longest short story I’ve written.  However, I feel really good about this one, the way it’s unfolded, the themes that have emerged.  I really want to finish this story, and hopefully the work I put in today will serve to spur my inspiration, and power me through the home stretch.

Normally, I try to work on at least three pieces a week, but as I’m easing back into things, this will do it for today.  Keep an eye out for the Writer’s Desk tomorrow, and as always, dare to dream. – MK