I've written long and short; fiction and non; for publication/pay and for personal pleasure. Before kids, almost all of my fiction ideas were novel length. Before Zoe, I wrote a novel that I ended up shelving. After she was born and while she was an infant, I focused on short freelance work. Between Zoe and Liam I wrote the first draft of a second novel. But since his birth, I haven't been able to pick it back up. These work patterns are all very much tied to sleep.
Liam was born almost 18 months ago now (sheesh). Since then, I have written a few shorter pieces. Funny, because I hadn't written short stories since college. But at this stage in life (read: sleep deprivation), I don't have the attention span to hold all of the narrative threads of a novel in my brain.
Some people have kids who sleep through the night consistently at six or eight weeks. I do not have this mythical kind of child. My kids start sleeping through the night more around 18-24 months. I wasn't a great sleeper either. My parents had to drive me around to get me to fall asleep until I was four or five years old, so relatively speaking, things could be worse. This isn't me whining about my kids' sleeping patterns. It just is what it is. My kids don't sleep, which means I don't either, at least not while they're infants/toddlers. There's a reason I wrote a draft of a novel after Zoe was two, and I haven't been able to pick it back up since her brother was born.
So I adapt and look for ways to keep writing. Not as frequently or as steadily as I'd like, but I'll take what I can get. I've written a flash fiction piece about the last two speakers of a dying language who refuse to speak to each other (around 300 words); a story about Santa Claus that was published last year (around 5,500 words); a short story about the afterlife (about 5,300 words); and an essay about art and writing (2,000 words).
My short fiction tends toward the longer side. Many writer-types put the upper limit of a story at about 7,500 words. Recently, I got an idea about a haunted house, and I figured it would become one of my typical 5,000 words or so pieces. Longish, but still in the realm of the short story. So I started writing. And now the story is pulling a Jack and the bean stalk on me and sprouting. I'm at 10,500 words with about two scenes left to write. I say that, but I've thought I have only two scenes left to write a few times, and then I keep thinking of something else to add. This word count puts me firmly into novelette territory (the strange and interesting land between a short story and a novella).
The length started scaring me a little, and then I got excited. My stories are growing again! Maybe this means I will have the brain power to work on the novel soon. So my goal is to wrap up a draft or a few of this novelette (or whatever it ends up being), and then I'll dip my toes back into my second novel and see what happens.
The other interesting factor (to me and probably only to other writers, if then) is that for most of my writing life, I considered myself a "mainstream" or a "literary" writer. My novel/stories were realistic and about things like relationships, life decisions, conflict, etc. However, my recent ideas are all genre-oriented. I guess they'd be considered speculative fiction. In the past couple of years (which coincides with my time as a mom), I've tackled Santa, the afterlife, and now a haunted house. The novel I want to pick up again is horror-ish. I have no idea what this means, but I'm having fun with the change.
