I keep coming back to short stories

I've "decided to write a novel" so many times I've lost count. I've got two books that are sort of 3/4 first drafts. Each has some good stuff in it, but neither is likely to be finished.

Then there's the one I worked on most recently. For that one I have less text written, but I have a strong plan, and I know I could finish it. But I still concluded that I need to work on stories more before I write it.

It's not that stories are exactly like novels, not by a long shot. But I think I need to work on structure structure structure and be able to more reliably produce good stories.

I've gone through this process before. But I'm more engaged in the story process than ever before. I'm actively looking for the stories I like and for where they are published; I'm analyzing the stories I like, and modeling on them.

The fact that there are now a lot of SF stories available for download, whole magazines of them, and that I can copy them to a file and break them apart on my computer, is a big boon. The process is a lot of fun.