Currently at 34,000+ words. Now it's starting to feel like a slog, but I have to keep at it. It feels like I've been writing crap for the past...30,000 words though. It's really a struggle for me to write past even 15,000 (in general). Any advice on how to stay motivated? The only thing I keep telling myself is that once I finish a full-length novel, the second will be easier.
First off: Fuck McCardley et al. (runs to hide: I am actually very fond of McCardley and most of the AW crowd, but haven't been around much)
Second: If you think FINISHING 0ver 30,000 words is tough, wait till you have to EDIT that shit. Editing is what you do when watching paint dry is too exciting, and growing your own lymphoma isn't painful enough. So.....yeah. If you think you're hitting the wall, you aren't. You're hitting the little parking bump they put in front of the wall, to stop you from driving into the side of your local BP when you stop for milk.
Third: It will suck. Different things suck for different people, but it sounds like for you, you are a "short story ideas" guy. So....either you find ways to expand that, or you don't. Maybe you're SSFL (short story for life, yo -- throws most gangster salute he can manage as a Midwestern whiteboy) and your inclinations just skew heavily to shorts. Fine......sometimes things are what they are. That said, I believe, firmly, that The Stand could have become a 20-page vignette, and The Boogeyman could have been a 1,000-page doorstop of slowly-encroaching doom, a hybrid of Cujo and Rebecca (if these are unfamiliar, make sweet, dirty love to Google ASAP)....if you want to make your stories longer, and for that matter, if you don't but you want longer-format ideas, give your brain some quiet time. Not by smoking opium, silly, but by turning shit off--I used to drive 30 minutes to work and 30 minutes home.....and once I turned my radio off, both ways, for like a month, my brain got REALLY noisy: lots of stories gained 100 pounds once I started asking questions like "why would Aaron kill a guy, ro try to rape his wife?" or "OK, so if she wanted to kill Aaron and his friends, what would that actually entail--where would she get a gun? How would it go down? What would it do to her, as a person?" All these things take up page-space. In The Boogeyman you get inklings of it, from the MC's hostility towards his shrink, but it is a short story. Its a quickie: the entire end-goal of the story is busting a glorious nut, all over someone you barely know, in a rush to climax. That's not a bad thing, but that night could go either way: A novel-length story may tell 90% of the same shit, but in a vastly more intimate, measured way. Nothing wrong with either format (sometimes quickies are insanely gratifying, sometimes an entire night of exploration is.....) but they are 2 differing sides of 1 coin.
Maybe you only want to write shorts. That's fine. Maybe you just need enough quiet space to dig a bit deeper. That's also fine. Give yourself some quiet time, and perhaps you will add meat to the bones of your short stories. Or maybe you'll find shorts are all you truly have in you. But give it the space to find itself--find at least an hour of quite time, for 3-4 weeks. Let things percolate. and see if they grow legs of their own....