Short Story Briefing- Pun Intended

Once more, I've hit the creative roadblock that always happens during every book I write.  I've built the world, named its inhabitants, and identified where they belong within the over-arching story.  When I write and think of writing, I use a lot of music as an aid and it puts images in my mind of moments that would be really cool to explore in a book.  Unfortunately, this leaves my characters doing a lot of really cool things with no development in the middle.  If I wanted that, I'd write new scripts for He-Man, or I'd recreate new Conan comics, but I want my work to have more substance.

The latent issue is coming up with realistic events that tie these "action scenes" together in a way that leaves you emotionally-impacted when whatever happens happens.  Sure, it's sad to see someone getting crushed under the heel of a hundred-foot-tall monster called the Monolith, but it's a lot more side when you have two-hundred thirty pages invested in them.  Ultimately, I'm trying to create the believable characters that react the way I imagine they would in certain situations.  I want my books to read like really good movies.  That, I'm finding, is seriously hard.

And so I go to the short story.

In every tale is a cast of characters somewhere between major and tertiary, but none of them fill the place of "hero" except one.  You can develop them in a book as much as you want, but the reader will normally root (if you've written them properly) for your main character.  The other guys are interesting for sure, just not enough to warrant a fifty-thousand-word lexicon of their goings on.

Instead of giving them their own full novels, I've decided to write snippets, little slices of their lives and events that ultimately bring about the end of the entire saga.  With these, I can talk about any event that I want, flesh out whomever I want, and make moments as cool, crazy, or interesting as I want because I don't have to worry about tying them together with a lot of "Middle-Earth walking".  I get to kill two birds with one stone: eliminating my roadblock, and writing constructively until I can focus on the novel again.

I'm working on a few short stories that I'll tie together in compilations, but in the meantime I'd like some feedback from you guys, either on here or via e-mail, for suggestions about what you'd like to see or whom you'd like to hear about.  After all, the story doesn't go forward without you.

Here's to the future!