Hey Y'all! What a great thread.

How do I put a story together? Like many others here, I tend to shoot from the hip. The two novella length stories I'm working on started out as short stories that I couldn't seem to finish. Once the characters came to life, they had stories to tell that couldn't be told in 2,000 words. I'm not certain I will finish either of them without quite a bit of re-writing, but I'm determined.

I have never used an outline for fiction. I spent so many years doing technical writing as a job that when I began to write fiction again, I wanted nothing to do with structure! lol! On the other hand, I have tried to put some general structure in anything new I write.

I'm currently on hiatus from the novella and writing primarily short stories and poetry. One important thing I've found is that writing poetry is making my prose writing tighter. I'm learning to use far fewer words to say the same thing. I recommend poetry writing to anyone who suffers from excessive word usage! Haiku is especially helpful at cutting out superfluous words.

I wrote my first erotic short story last year and was quite pleased with the reaction from my friends and dom (who is also my husband). All that positive reinforcement made me want to write more. :-)