The Short of It

When I think back to the initial months of the COVID-19 pandemic, I remember time more than anything. The entire world slowed down. For some, it was agonizing. For others, it was fatal. I’d been working as a freelance copyeditor for around eight years by then, so my paying job filled some of the time vacancy. Keeping a seven-year-old entertained took up some of the rest. With what was left, I wrote a short story and the first draft of a fifth novel.

As detailed in a previous post, the rewrite of The Road Cain Walks clocked in at a portly 296,547 words, which is equal to three average-length books. That was a mistake I understood immediately. I needed to learn to write shorter, which I did with Shadow on the Sun. Never one to go halfway in, I wanted to see how tight I could get my writing.

Since it became popular back in the mid-2000s, I’ve been terrified of flash fiction. I had a friend who wrote well in the medium and it always baffled me. Like William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” I acknowledge the preciseness of the writing necessary to effectively convey a point in 1,000 words, but not the story. Those require more wiggle room, so I settled on a 7,000-word short story.

The title is “What Comes Around,” and the basic premise is an alien invasion. That’s all I’ll say about the plot, because though it doesn’t have an official spot on my to-do list, I plan to wedge in a rewrite between my larger projects. The key point is that I successfully set up and met a low word count. Being who I am, I also kept developing the idea until it became a full-length novel.

My general concept is to write three short stories that combine like a giant 80s space robot into a single entity. It was an idea I entertained for the book series, writing each novel as a standalone story that exists on a singular timeline with the others. The plan eventually changed, but I’m still obsessed with the strategy. A good portion of my work explores that playground, tinkering with the formula across single novels, a trilogy, and a nine-book series.

In a way, COVID is responsible for that too. Isolated, I sought out connection. A lot of us are still searching for those intersecting lines that used to make up our world. I wrote them into my stories as a monument to what they looked like.

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As always, thanks for reading! I’m posting the edited chapters of the third and final edition of The Road Cain Walks along with commentary over at Substack. Usable feedback (i.e., more than “it’s great” or “it sucks”) will earn access to future chapters that will appear behind the paywall.

I’ve also recently found the file disk for the original edition of The Road Cain Walks. As soon as I have time to convert the files, I’ll start adding the chapters for it and the second edition rewrite here.