{"id":4252,"date":"2026-09-30T15:32:51","date_gmt":"2026-09-30T19:32:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/?p=4252"},"modified":"2026-10-01T03:42:06","modified_gmt":"2026-10-01T07:42:06","slug":"new-completed-short-story-home-to-the-sky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/?p=4252","title":{"rendered":"New Completed Short Story: \u201cHome to the Sky\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"entry-content post_content\">\n<p>A last-minute decision to write a story I was thinking about while walking to the post office has manifested in this. A new story!<\/p>\n<p>Inspired by the passion some of the writers I&#8217;m talking to seem to have for shorter stories, I checked out a few of the submissions calls for shorter stories than what I usually write, and I really liked one market&#8217;s mission statement about what kinds of relationships they want to publish stories about.\u00a0<em>I can write about that<\/em>, I thought.<\/p>\n<p>So I did.<\/p>\n<p>I am typically more of a discover-it-as-you-go writer (\u201ca pantser,\u201d as we are colloquially called), but I&#8217;ve found on shorter stories that the concept more or less IS the plot, and if you know the point you want to make, the journey to get there is a straight line. I&#8217;m definitely more used to figuring out what my characters want to say by letting them say it. This is not better or worse, but it is less comfortable.<\/p>\n<p>Which is not necessarily a bad thing.<\/p>\n<p>I only had a couple \u201cpantser\u201d moments when things I didn&#8217;t intend to click DID click together, but mostly it was a pretty intentionally written story and I enjoyed seeing a story be FINISHED at less than 2,000 words.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cHome to the Sky\u201d happens in a strange world where when kids become adults, their parents select a sort of magical token for them. A woman&#8217;s son is on the brink of this and she wants to give him the token he&#8217;s asked for, but the boy&#8217;s father wants him to have something else. The resolution to this problem also offers a revelation about the mother and father&#8217;s relationship.<\/p>\n<p>Still a little creeped out by these tiny word counts.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A last-minute decision to write a story I was thinking about while walking to the post office has manifested in this. A new story! Inspired by the passion some of the writers I&#8217;m talking to seem to have for shorter stories, I checked out a few of the submissions calls for shorter stories than what [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,5,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-news","category-short-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4252"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4253,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4252\/revisions\/4253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/juliesondradecker.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}