"The most demanding form after poetry..."*

(*the short story, according to William Faulkner.)

For the first time in a long while, I'm working on a new short story.

When I had my epiphany moment in 1996 and decided it was time to get real about this whole writing thing, I started with short stories. For a while I wrote a new one every week, as if the stories had piled up in my brain over the years and then burst forth in a rush when I finally took them seriously. They averaged 3,000 words, which still seems to me about right for a shor...