There’s a strange pressure when it comes to writing short stories. I don’t know how to do it. I only know how to take an idea with the tip of my fingers and run along a canvas putting together worlds and backstories and characters and sequels. I admire people who write a lot of short stories. Because I’ve tried. Prompts. Writing exercises. Word limits. Non-fiction type short stories. And yet they either fall apart after the first page or run off with screaming glee and become one of the many vast worlds that exist in my folders of writing. And so I sit here at the computer not knowing what to do. The minimum is fifteen-hundred words and the max is three-thousand. It has to be a coherent segment of a story or a short story. And I have no idea what to use. I only have a handful of short stories and they’re all from previous assignments. And some of them I just think are trash or not interesting for this type of assignment. We have to have a partner. And that worries me. I often feel like a shadow in crowds and lost the feeling in my legs at the ice-breaker for this class in the first week of tutorials. What am I going to do… what am I going to do?

The computer lab is quiet. Probably because I’m out here at one-AM. Usually I leave by ten-thirty. But I decided to stay and now I can’t leave. Last bus is at eleven-thirty. First bus is around six-thirty. I’m here for at least another five hours. It’s interesting when the lab is empty. I wonder if the security cameras will catch my murder. Or just me rolling off the booth seat when I fall asleep. Maybe there’s a ghost in the labs or the halls. Maybe they’ll give me some inspiration. I see a lot of nursing and med students in here.  Maybe the ghosts will be similar. What’s an art student doing in here? Am I an art student even? I guess so.

I have a story called The Pirate and the Clumsy Mage but the first 3000 words don’t bring in the relationship between Fiore and Luka, which is a main part of the story. There’s Best of Enemies and the style is very different but the first 3000 words is literally development of just the characters because it’s narrative one page, dialogue the next, narrative again etc. Then there are my treasured works. The ones I’ve been spending years on. But they’re all a few hundred pages and so the first chapter blows that 3000 mark out of the water. I thought about The Perfect Romance. KWB118. I liked it. I like the idea of it. And it’s only 2,700 words. I can work with that. But is it too boring? I don’t want to bore my partner. But it doesn’t have to be perfectly finished. Isn’t that the point of an editor? But shouldn’t I think it near perfect, of not, for it to be worth the look-over from an editor.