Hello, fellow campaigners of the writing world! A. F. Kopp is here with an exciting blog post about what I’ve been working on lately. (ALSO, I’ve updated my uploading schedule to Friday since I publish my Wattpad story on Thursdays and don’t want to spam my lovely Instagram followers).
As you all know, I’ve been editing my debut novel and writing sci-fi on the side, but I haven’t told many people that I’m getting into writing short stories. I genuinely hated short stories for the longest time. I had to write a couple for a contest and for classes, but it’s so hard getting a whole plot narrowed down to only a few pages! But much like my old hate for poetry, when I forced myself to do it and found I loved it. And I got incitive to go outside my comfort zone: I joined two anthologies.
AHHH! I’m so excited. Some of my work will be published soon! I will announce the names of the anthologies soon enough, but I will share the two vastly different stories I’m working on.
A Maisie Story
So, for those who don’t know, Hattie’s aunt in the Hope of Hattie Phelan lost her first husband in the Civil War. For a historical short story, I decided to write about her receiving the news of the death of her husband. It was fun to write (and sad), but I was able to get my story down to a good size.
Usually, with short story length, I push the limit, haha. In my creative writing class, the page limits were between 5-20 pages. And my professor said in between was even better. But I pushed it at a multi-chapter 17-page monster. I feel bad for putting my classmates through reading that beast, lol.
But with the Maisie story (it has a title but I don’t want to spoil the anthology), I went UNDER the limit by a lot. The limit was 5,000 words and my word count was 1,673. That was a miracle. But I think that since I knew what I wanted, I was able to narrow it down to a few words.
I’m really happy with how it turned out because I feel it really gets into the emotions of Maisie as she goes through the loss of her husband. And I think it will be good to eventually write a few short stories and publish a collection about Tuckerton. Like a book of prequel short stories, maybe. I’ve already toyed around with formatting, don’t judge me.
CinderEVIL
So, the second story is vastly different. It is a fantasy short story that I need to keep under 10,000 words. I’m not done with it yet, but it explores a plot that I’ve been ruminating on for a while. The thought came to me “what if Cinderella was EVIL!” (CinderEVIL is not the finished title, btw.)
So, not to give too much away, I am writing it from both the eldest step-sister’s POV and Cinderella’s POV and covers the ball and its after-effects. It’s obviously really rough right now since I’m just getting the idea down, but I am loving the parallels between the original fairytale and “what really happened.”
My biggest fears are that the Evil Cinderella is too snotty/mean and that it won’t get under the word count. So far I’m about a quarter into the story and I’m at about 2k words. Since the deadline isn’t even until August, I am only going to be working on it on Saturdays, that way I don’t get too distracted with this story when I have so many other things to write.
Not a long post, but this is what I came up with.
Do you like short stories? What length of a story is your favorite?
Thanks for reading!
Salutations, fellow adventurers!
Respectfully,
A. F. Kopp Author 