Writing progress

I'm taking a little break from my manuscript. I hit a point and didn't know how to proceed through the next chunk of the book. So, I began writing the last chunk of the book and figured I would go back and connect the two together. That's been working pretty good, but I keep getting frustrated about that missing part.
In order to keep the writing alive, I've worked on a couple of short stories. This is pretty odd for me, I've never been good at short stories or had much of a desire to write them. But, I figured they would be good practice for developing character arcs, and writing is writing, right?

On Saturday while I was working at a registration table for a work event, I pulled out my trusty little Alphasmart and wrote 5,000 words on a short story. Bam! That felt pretty damn good. I'm hoping to write a few of them for a themed anthology I could submit to an e-publisher.

I also learned of an opportunity to submit a story based on a certain topic for a specific anthology. So, I'm writing a story for that. In the first chunk of my lunch break today, I wrote 400 words. The story can be between 3k and 10k. I've got an idea of what's going to happen so I'm going to write it out then flesh it out if need be.

I'm really liking the idea of writing some short stories and possibly even novellas. I think it will keep things fresh and exciting while I'm working on novels, so I don't get too bogged down.

And, to be honest, assuming I can actually get e-published - the instant gratification would be really nice! That would be a great boost and motivation to keep working on longer works.

All in all writing is going well and I'm feeling good about it.