We had a great weekend away in Wivenhoe, a small town in Essex, last weekend. Long time back, when I was just a snip of boy, I went to Essex University for nearly seven years, first doing a B.Sc. in Physics, then a Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics (and what a waste of time that was). Wivenhoe is just a mile or two from the University and I lived there for about three-and-a-half years. It's a nice little town. It was once a fishing town, and down by the quay the houses are a jumble of different styles and piling into each other. There are quite a few houses there four or five hundred years old.

Steph had never been there before, and as we were feeling a little stressed by work and so forth, we took a long weekend to escape everything. We had a couple of long walks along the river, by the mud flats and marshes, and in the woods. We saw two castles, to give Steph her hit of old England, and hung out with an old friend of mine. We stayed in an ancient fisherman's cottage that is now a Bed and Breakfast. Apart from one night, we were the only guests, so it was peaceful and relaxing. All in all, we had a wonderful time and both came out of it feeling a hell of lot better than we had before.

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I've been going through a fairly long dry phase with acceptances. I've only sold two stories this year so far, and although they were both to great pro markets, that's less than I had by this time last year. It's kind of depressing, because you always want to make progress, and publications are the most obvious way of measuring that progress. I also feel that the stories I've written in the last year have been much stronger than the ones I wrote before, but I haven't sold any of them.

On our weekend away, we had a session where we sat down and talked about what we wanted from our writing and where we wanted to be in six months, a year, 18 months and five years. It was fairly instructive. You see, I've never particularly seen myself as being a short story writer. I always wanted to be a novelist, and I really wanted to be writing the kind of fat fantasy or science fiction novels that I get really absorbed in reading. Short stories can be a bit of trap if you want to be writing novels. There's a lot of pressure to get on the short story ladder and start climbing. Clarion (West) does this. Hanging out with other short story writers does this. Occasional success with publications or encouraging rejections does this. The friendly competition with other neo-pro short story writers does this. Endless writing advice books and websites do this.

But writing short stories doesn't do much to advance writing novels. Yes, you can learn to form sentences, paragraphs, scenes more perfectly. You can learn how to use imagery, metaphor. You can learn how to plot and pace. But you can learn all of this writing novels too, and there are whole bunch of skills you need for novels that you just don't get from writing short stories.

Not that I'm resenting having some success at short stories. I like writing short stories. There's a lot of satisfaction in completing a story that seems to work. There's a lot of satisfaction in writing a story that is better than the one before. There's an enormous amount of satisfaction in getting published by a magazine you respect (and why would you send a story to one you don't respect, right?). And then there's the encouragement factor. It takes a long time to write a novel and even longer to get one published. Without the boosts of short story sales, I don't know if I'd have kept up writing at the same pace. There is also a lot to be said for having a number of good pro publications under your belt when you approach a novel publisher or agent.

Despite all that, short stories aren't where I want to be with publication. Or, I should say, they are not the main place I want to be. And the short story publication pressure is meaning that I'm spending far more time and effort on the short stories than I do on the novels, and that's skewed.

Drawing up our five year plans made me focus on what I need to do in order to get where I want to be (being deliberately vague with the plans here; I'm not sure I'm ready to make them public yet). It means that I'm going to be cutting down the amount of time I spend on short stories and increasing the amount of time I spend on writing and marketing novels.

It also means that I'm going to give less time for each novel to prove itself. It seems to me that there is an all-eggs-in-one-basket danger in marketing novels. While one is out there doing the rounds, I am a little reluctant to be writing subsequent novels (I hate the idea of a large backlog of unmarketed, unpublished novels) and thereby I'm less likely to improve. It's going to be a tough decision to retire the current novel when its time comes, because I do believe in it and I do believe that it's both publishable and commercial, but I will have to do it, I think, if I want to make a career from this.

I'm not going to give up short stories completely, of course. If I get a strong idea, I'll go for it. But I won't go searching so strongly for short story ideas.

In terms of the above, I've started to wonder whether my short fiction review journal is a bit of dead end. I started it to help me get better at short fiction, and it has been useful in that way. But now I'm wondering if I should be reviewing novels instead. I'm not planning any changes at the moment, but I'll be keeping it in mind.

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Having said all that, I'm really pleased about the progress I'm making with my current short story, Winter Sparrows. I've written just under 3,500 words and will probably do another couple of thousand before it ends. That'll make it a good length. The story is flowing well, too. It'll be the last one for a while (novels after this) so I'm hoping it works out well.