About a week ago, by your reading, I finished writing a short story. The fact that I was writing a short story when I should have been working on the novel is perhaps a bit distressing, but I've taken the opinion that any work on short fiction--particularly short fiction where I'm excited about the project and reasonably happy with the results--is worth what ever attention and love I can spare for it.
So I took a break from my novel to write a short story. Most of my attempts at short fiction are so abortive that I was hesitant to even talk about it on the blog lest I jinx myself in some way.
But nevertheless, I got to a first draft. A first draft, that has an ending which doesn't suck. This is a major accomplishment.
I'm not going to talk too much about it now, as it still has to pass muster with my reviewers and get edited into something a bit less rambling, but for right now I've chosen to take pleasure in the acomplishment.
I will, however, say that the story is basically a compression of a lot of the ideas in the novel I'm writing. The short story is set about 10-15 years before the story, but it has many of the same core characters, and--I guess--reformulates the core issues in the novel's story in a different context.
Oh, and it's a pretty cool space-adventure at the same time.
Because that's how I swing.