Budgeting My Time

I've been awkwardly stalled on my Austen and Lawrence reading challenges for the last two months, so I'm gracefully bowing out of them until mid-December when I finish this semester and am not reading for three literature classes.
However, I think I am going to do NaNoWriMo again this year. I had to quit ScriptFrenzy, but there are a few stories I've been sketching out that I really need to push myself to bang out into a solid draft. Knowing myself, I need to write to keep myself balanced (mentally and emotionally) and I haven't been doing it lately. I need to make myself do it because I feel the frustration of unexpressed words building up in me which makes me grumpy and, eventually, depressed.
There are several stories I'm between, not sure which one I'll NaNo- I have a story I wrote a while back but basically completely scrapped, over the sumer I made an outline that restructured it completely and even changed out some characters. There's also my short story, "Target Girl"- I think that could be expanded, as well as a few random ideas I've been kicking around in an abstract way.
Reading is incredibly important and I know I'll never have enough time in my life to read all the great books I ought to- there being created much faster than I can read them and so many were created before my birth- but in the end, I want to write a few great books that are worthy of someone else's overly ambitious reading list.
For a while, books were a great majority of my life and I'm at the point where I'm trying to balance out the time I spend reading with that I spend writing and also the time I spend doing. I think in the end this is a much healthier attitude toward books. I shouldn't only live them.
But, I digress, expect many updates about the story I choose as NaNo gears up.

The Wasteland of Summer

Summer has a strange effect on most people; lists of goals are compiled from the books you want to read to the household improvements you should make. However, summer is the most distracting season. Possibly the worst season to try and accomplish anything in. My impossibly ambitious reading lists are always interrupted by the urge to take a walk or go to a concert or out to coffee with friends.
Then around the time when July seeps into August, you hit the wasteland. It's a time when very little artistic or interesting things are happening. All the movies in the theatre are 'action flicks,' all the tables in the bookstore are lined with romance novels and a wave of fatigue hits you. What have you done with your summer? There's only a month left to accomplish everything you wanted to do.
To be honest, I have accomplished a lot, just not the things I expected. That should content me. Things have really slowed down on Etsy, so I'll not worry as much about making stock until the cooler months when online buying picks up again and spend the rest of my summer working on my reading and writing my stories. I've had more ideas concerning my short, "Target Girl" and would like to work on turning it into a full length story. I'm still working on "Anachronism," the novella I wrote last summer. There are so many changes I want to make and so many new ideas I have for it. Now it's a matter of figuring out the shape of the story with these changes in place. Structure is so important. A great story can be ruined if you tell it the wrong way.

New Short Story: "Target Girl"

I wrote a new short story last night, I have no idea where it came from. It's very short as all my short stories are, about 800 words. It's about a knife thrower's assistant. It's called "Target Girl". Obviously, it's very new and needs some editing, but I like it.
Most of my short stories are more like a quick scene or two that show a glimpse of a relationship or a situation and imply the back story. Sometimes I am irritatingly ambiguous (apparently)and I am quite obsessed with backstory. So, in this go round the short fiction carousel, I tried to make the front story just as interesting and active as the back story that is hinted at, and I make my ending more definative and less disputable.
Perhaps it's because as a reader I enjoy stories that leave a lot open to interpretation and are less literal that I usually write like that. Sometimes it seems to piss people off. I took a "Sudden Fiction" class two semesters ago which was structured like a workshop. We would read and discuss our work as a group. I found many of the other students wanted to be told exactly what was happening at all times, exactly how the story ended. They felt very strongly about it. I'm too young to be quite so set in my ways that I won't try new things. I hope that some experimentation will kick up inspiration for a novel length story I've been having trouble with.
So here's my first paragraph as it stands in all its rough draft grit:

Laura slid her hands down the sides of her body feeling the stiff boning around her waist and the sequins like scales that draped, barely covering her hips. She squirmed slightly hoping to make the skirt seem longer. The fading sunlight warmed her little canvas dressing tent. With a pitted looking glass, she applied her powder and slipped on her feathered headband.

I've always believe in brevity in openings. It certainly departs from my usual stories. I've always been fascinated with traveling shows of the late 19th early 20th century anyway, and what's more captivating than the impalement arts?