I really don’t know how short story writers manage it. They must have incredible focus.
I was recently offered the opportunity to write a piece of short fiction for a blog event – “Just use your own characters, whichever you like, and oooh, anything over 500 words would be great” – so yeah, between 500 and 1000 words would probably be enough.
Can I? Can I heck as like! But it’s fun anyway. Id forgotten how much I enjoyed writing Briers.
Early February and things were pretty much dead on the espionage front. It was bitterly cold and there was a lot of snow, just the time to steal the march on one’s opponents, one would have thought, but the reports that came in from outlying agents were sadly lacking in action. Briers Allerdale could only assume that his various opponents were doing what he was doing – following orders to sit in an office pretending to work and be bored out of their minds. He had even sunk so low as to tackle the filing.
“God, what I wouldn’t give for a nice juicy assassination attempt,” he muttered as he slammed the filing cabinet. He shuffled over to the fireplace and made more fuss than necessary over adding a few lumps of coal to the already blazing hearth.
“You’ll set the chimney on fire.” Basset muttered. He was rocking in his chair, balanced on the two back legs of it, and had given up all pretence of looking busy in favour of making paper aeroplanes. “But then we’d be warm and have something exciting to do, so go ahead.” He launched his missile and missed the waste paper basket by inches. Briers picked it up and threw it back.
The phone rang and they both lunged for it, Basset beating Briers by a short head.
“Hello, International Trade and Exchange,” Basset said. “Oh – right. Allerdale, it’s for you.”
“Hah!” Briers grabbed the handset from him. “Yes, what?”
“Politeness doesn’t cost anything, you know.” The bureau chief sounded harrassed.
Aaaaand the game is afoot. Watch this space for more info on the blog event. I think it’ll be a really cool one.
Nice excerpt! 🙂 I admit I’m intrigued.
I write short a lot. I actually prefer it over long, but there’s short and there’s shoooooooort. 😉
Thanks, Fen. This is short short, but i wish i was better at making a nice concise plot that would fit neatly into 20k words. I could maybe manage 2 publications a year one year and a proper 60k jobbie the next.
It’s the quality, not the quantity. Oh wait…in your case it would be both! Write as much as you’d like. We’ll read it. 🙂