38 stories down, 30something to go

Yesterday I wrote two short stories for my next Salt book: one based on a famous bit in the Book of Matthew and one about a man having an epileptic fit. The second one isn't right yet, but the bones are there. Afterwards I added them to my list to find I have 38 stories written, out of a target of 70 odd. So, more than halfway. I'm aiming to finish the manuscript in spring next year; that's an agreeably vague deadline, but I reckon I need to hit 50 by the end of 2010, which means I need to produce about one every three days between now and then.

In a way that seems a lot. But my stories tend to be very short, so in terms of word counts it's not so bad. And actually, I find it much easier to write a lot of prose fiction than a little – once I build up a head of steam, it just feels more fluent, and the ideas come too. So one every three days is probably easier than one a week.

Meanwhile in amongst the marking and preparing for a dayschool tomorrow, I've got a proposal to draw up for a conference on short stories. I want to focus on microfiction, but I can't decide whether to make it general or whether to focus on the work of David Gaffney (whose new book was despatched to me yesterday, the Amazon robots tell me - ace).