Tiffany Rambles

Before I start talking about how horrible my relationship with short story writing is, let me give you some important links and info. Tiffany Rambles is a merge of my The Adolescent Writer blog and my Savior of the Damned blog. Basically, all of the content at those sites will be here and vice versa. However, it's much easier to subscribe to posts here. Plus, blog spot has better looking blogs than Weebly. Don't expect the content here and there to differ by a lot, if it differs at all.

To sum me up: I'm a young, aspiring writer and a weird workaholic ready to be discovered (somewhat). I have a novel site and an author site, as well as a general writing forum that I am running with Kiana, my co-admin and friend. I've been in and out of the writing world -- though not any published venues apart from Suspense Mag and my old high school's newspaper -- for at least five years. Now I'm finally here to stay.

Yayzers! Introductions are over with (at least on my part. I don't like introductions. I can only paint a biased image of myself. I'd like to know who YOU are, though. Remind me that I am not just talking to myself, though there's certainly nothing wrong with that. Do it all the time! Wonderful part of writing!).

Anyway, I went off on a tangent. I do that....

Namely, I'm a novelist. In the 8th grade, to broaden my horizons, I attempted to write a short story in every genre. I threw all of those horrible short stories in the back of my closet, where a box full of horrible novellas are rotting away, and turned to one story out of that Practice Package: Savior of the Damned. What started off as an idea that I didn't like when I first wrote it became the novel I am soon hoping to publish and have been writing/rewriting/editing for five years.

Those short stories were horrible for a number of reasons. First off, some of them lacked passion. I required myself to write in every genre, including ones I hated and knew nothing about. Secondly, I couldn't write for crap. (I just censored myself there. Hm. Who is my audience? Do you care if I curse now and then? Does it matter either way?) There were grammatical and sentence structure errors galore. But the biggest reason I tossed them was because none of them actually ENDED. Every short story was written like the first chapter of a novel.

And the reason my tough love with short stories is relevant now? I have just finished the third draft of my novel and am in the process of sending it out to five beta readers/editors. I will give them two months to tear my novel apart. In those two months, I plan on taking free online creative writing classes. Then, I want to have a short story collection consisting of material I can actually send to magazines.

Short stories are not my strong point, but I will be working diligently in the next two months to turn that around. Tough love is a challenge. I like it!