Perhaps you need to look back before you can move ahead.
A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down.
I'm a writer first and an editor second. . . or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command.
During the many centuries that magic, here on this planet, was presumed to have worked, there were at least as many theories as to how magic worked as there were cultures and religions.
I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published.
Short-story writing requires an exquisite sense of balance. Novelists, frankly, can get away with more. A novel can have a dull spot or two, because the reader has made a different commitment.
Everything here must be done twice as no one can do it right the first time.
No species. . . possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history. . . The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.
The ultimate truth is so simple. It is nothing more than being in the pristine state. This is all that needs to be said. Only mature minds can grasp the simple truth in all its nakedness.
Bridget Jones' Baby, at heart is about the gap between how you expect life to turn out and how it actually does.