Writing bores me. A few thousand words in and I feel like I’ve explored pretty much everything to do with a situation, a feeling I’ve probably learned from years of 3-minute improv scenes. I want to get around this, because I love writing and I want to work on larger pieces, but I firmly believe that short stories should be fun and playful and emotionally cheap. I very much like Ursula Le Guin, but I cannot read her short stories because I find them exhausting — every one I finish and I feel I have burned away a little part of my life energy because they are so rich, so alive that I cannot read more than one a week even if I am making a concerted effort. I can read and adore Borges because his short stories, even the ones about murder and war, are all quite silly. So I cannot spend time trying to ‘perfect’ my short stories because perfection in short stories means that the stories are no longer cheap, are no longer playful.