On October 12th, I got an e-mail announcing the Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards.  The e-mail included a call for genre short stories between 1,500 and 4,000 words with an early bird deadline of October 16th.  Winners would get their work published, receive prize money, and be paid to attend a conference.

Short stories are fundamentally different from novels, and not just in terms of length.  What a short story can accomplish is radically different from a novel.  A novel is a marathon, and a short story the fifty-yard dash.  For the most part, I prefer novelistic writing, so I can take time building characters and making thematic points.  But I’ve also enjoyed the short stories of authors like Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick, who fit compelling points into a handful of pages.

Earlier on the 12th, while on a run, a very strange idea popped into my head.  I won’t say what it was until it’s been published, but in a general sense it was about an individual who found everyone around her behaving strangely in the same incomprehensible way.  It was somewhat reminiscent of PKD’s The Adjustment Team, due to weirdness.

The idea seemed suited to being a screenplay, but the Writer’s Digest e-mail got me thinking I should turn it into a short story.  So, I’d have to write it in four days.  Ok, four days plus the couple of remaining hours on October 12th.  I like a challenge.

Deadlines are fantastic motivators.  I started with a free write, and the words flowed faster than I’d expected.  After getting a solid chunk done, I made a brief outline, and decided to title the story Section Forty-Eight.  Even though a friend visited for a day that weekend, I finished a draft on the 15th and edited it for submission on the 16th.

The experience of writing Section Forty-Eight was great fun, partly because it was a departure from my usual creative writing.  While I typically use third person omniscient narrators, Section Forty-Eight employs a third-person limited narrator.  The novel I’m writing is for a young adult audience, and the short story aimed at adults.  The difference in style and audience allowed me to play with the structure and inject ambiguity into the story.

Hopefully Writer’s Digest will select me as one of their winners when they select them at the end of the year.  If not, I’ll start submitting to sci-fi magazines.