gorging on short stories.

Last night after playing Saints Row 2, which has for me become for the past few nights equatable to evening prayers to a devoute Catholic, I decided to read a short story before bed. All day I had bee carrying around an anthology I was required to purchase in my first year of the creative writing degree. Actually, it was in the creative writing introductory course that was used to cull the "writers" from the english majors who felt they could write.

I ended up reading from 11 pm to 2 am. I'm not what you'd call a fast reader. I can blow through things if I'm just looking for symbolism for use in those scavenger hunt-slash-essays that I used to write to appease the demi-gods of university otherwise known as professors. When I read for me I read with my writer's eyes and mouth. The eyes throw the words down my optic nerves and into my mouth where I roll them around and taste them. I taste how the syllable of the words the author chooses creates different sounds and shapes in my mouth.

I remember hearing somewhere that if you read and your lips moved you weren't very bright. I sometimes read and move my lips to the words if a particular passage moves me to. I think the statement about lip-readers is akin to phrenology, the study of the bumps on the skull to determine personality traits.

I used to care that people might see my lips moving. I love reading and I love it more when I'm into a story. I especially love short stories.

A couple weeks ago A and I went to Kitchener to visit her friends Julia and Manny. They are expecting a child. Julia is ready to pop.

We went and had dinner at a Greek restaurant in Waterloo, and at the next table a man was speaking very loudly about writing. He said, "I used to love writing, but I could never write a short story. I always had too much to say." He said it with this tone that, now I could be wrong, sounded like writing a book was more impressive than a short story.

Writing books are about stamina. They are about being able to shift your vision from the real world and to the world you are creating or recreating. Writing short stories are, well, short. They are about sprinting, getting it all in as succinctly as possible, using what the reader already has in their head to your advantage. There are many tricks that author use in short story writing. In a wave of a pen a skilled author can change a regular sentence like, "he was the best baseball player I had ever seen." into a piece of dialogue such as, "he was the best ball player they is." that can reveal so much more about the character than merely their opinion of baseball greats.

Last night I read a story about a stripper, another about a woman with a cervical cyst, another about 3 children and their grandparents surviving a trek across the African Savannah to get away from bandits, and another from the perspective of the writer of Roget's Thesaurus. Amazing stories. How do they do it?

I've written what I thought were short stories, but really they are novellas. I want to write something short. I want to write something that will say something. I want to write.