… give the reader plenty of chances to get to know my work in short form.

The key, though, is to work toward writing short fiction with the appeal of a novel. You’ve got to write stories not experiments or clever bits of nothing. Short fiction used to be all about stories, but then the short fiction markets became more literary, and for the longest time even in genre, experiment seemed to win out over story. Well, you know, sometimes writing an experiment is good for your skills, and I don’t rule out writing that kind of story once in a while, but the plan is not to do that any more than necessary.

Finally! An author who is of the same mind as I! (Or truthfully, yet another author. I get a little over-excited with each new one I discover.)

The are lots of great books and other resources to teach you how to make good fictional character, but my favorite step-by-step guide is Holly Lisle’s Create a Character Clinic. Here’s an overview of this tool, with an example character description as we go through it.