Short Stories

Another day has passed in which I haven't forced myself to do any recreational writing. This feels very wrong somehow. I've been constantly nagging myself for these past two days about the short fictional story I closed my NaNoWriMo with. I somehow always manage to forget how much I enjoy writing short stories until I actually write one, and then I fall in love with the genre all over again but fail to write until I forget again. I'm working against this this time.
There really is just something about the short story that I love. I like to leave a reader without all of the information and to give them room to make their own conclusions. I enjoy exploring a character just deep enough so that I feel a hint of their reality, but not enough to make me think that they couldn't exist. I like bringing the arc of a story to a close after only five thousand or two thousand words. In short, I like writing short stories. I think I have even been known to write a few good short stories. I'd like to set myself a goal now of writing at least one complete short story per week. I don't think this is unreasonable, or even particularly challenging. I can churn out a decent short story in less than an hour if I feel inspired. My goal is, though, to produce a story each week that is at least something that I can be proud of writing. NaNoWriMo focuses largely on learning to write even if you're not sure you have something to say, and much of my NaNoWriMo writing was accomplished through meandering self exploration. This has been very good for me over the past month, but it isn't writing that I could ever share with another person. I'd like to open up my audience from one person to maybe five or six, and so I now set myself the challenge of one short story (at least 2000 words, special circumstances excluded) per week. We'll see how it goes.