User blog:Kyle Meadows/Experimenting

I'm currently labbing some other ways to tell stories in this big mythos I'm building. I have a preference for long stories myself because I love depth, detail, and content. But! No bones about it, shorter stories are something that I think I need to work on doing, if for nothing else than attempting the practice brevity. I'm going to use some of the shorter pieces as narratives that are connected to the whole but more or less complete. As I don't have a complete grasp on how exactly this will look, I expect this to be bumpy until I have a hang on it.

I'm also going to toy with a different kind of horror here. The cosmic implications will exist, but I'm going to attempt with the next story I publish to push the horror into the background. It hasn't shown yet, but I am a fan of things that aren't necessarily scary at first glance, but then once you get into the how of it or when you examine the background events closely there are disturbing implications. Not necessarily even terrifying, but uncomfortable. For instance, I might say "they found out this thing," but not cover explicitly how they found it out. If you were to ask yourself how, based on the context you might be able to draw a few conclusions.

There's something wonderful about a story that tells you just enough to terrify you, but holds enough back that the uncertainty of a situation lingers. I'm not there quite yet, but I think that by practicing in this shorter format I can get better at using that limited space to create that lingering uncertainty.