Short story update
Nov. 26th, 2011 03:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
anthimeriaWhile I only have one story making the rounds now, and I'm waiting to hear back from the latest market, I am really excited about finally getting a good draft down on a story I've been meaning to write for years.
It's one of those ideas you have when you write a lot of spec-fic--you go, "Oh, stories usually go thus and such. Wouldn't it be interesting if I wrote a story where things when such and thus, instead?" But you don't have a plot or characters, so you write it in your story ideas folder and let it percolate.
Then one day it just happens, in your head, and you scramble to write enough of it down to remember for later because you're at work, of all fool places. Then as the idea percolates more and more over the rest of the workday you realize it's not just one short story, it's the beginning of a series of short stories--not a novel, probably, though you prod at that for a while--and then you get home exhausted and overworked and try to write it and it's trash. You throw up your hands and go back to working on your novel.
Then you get a long weekend, and read a short story collection wherein one of the stories hands you the solution to your story's problem on a silver platter, and you decide to mostly ignore what you've written already on the story--except for the really good bits and the general outline--and start over, with the new solution. So you begin to write at about, oh say, eight o'clock in the evening.
(I hope everyone reading this realizes that at some point this changed from a general-you to a second-person narrative.)
Then all of a sudden it's three-thirty in the morning and you have an 8k word newly written short story.
I have no idea where those eight hours went, but I'm really, really pleased with the results. I was not kidding when I said this is a story I've been trying to write forever--I had a stupid novel planned around the concept when I was in high school that never got off the ground, even. And it's a short story series! I've never really understood those, but man, I'm starting to. I did really try to poke this into novel territory, because how does one even go about selling a series of short stories, but it did not want to go. Some of the later stories might be novel-fodder, but this one was very insistent that it was a longish short story, thank you very much.
So now I have an 8k-word fantasy short story. Obviously it'll need editing, but in some ways I'm just pleased it finally exists. I hope I can sell it, because I have the same good feeling about it that I did "Well Enough" (of course, I also had that feeling about the story that's circulating now, and it got rejected by its target market, so take my "feelings" with a grain of salt. I do!). If nothing else, maybe I'll get the urge to write the later stories in the series and they'll sell.
In related awesome news, I've broken my own highest wordcount in one sitting record! Out of the 8k words of the short story, 5500 words were brand new, written today, which ups my highest-ever daily word count from 5000 to 5500. Shiny happiness for a writer who loves high daily wordcounts!
It's one of those ideas you have when you write a lot of spec-fic--you go, "Oh, stories usually go thus and such. Wouldn't it be interesting if I wrote a story where things when such and thus, instead?" But you don't have a plot or characters, so you write it in your story ideas folder and let it percolate.
Then one day it just happens, in your head, and you scramble to write enough of it down to remember for later because you're at work, of all fool places. Then as the idea percolates more and more over the rest of the workday you realize it's not just one short story, it's the beginning of a series of short stories--not a novel, probably, though you prod at that for a while--and then you get home exhausted and overworked and try to write it and it's trash. You throw up your hands and go back to working on your novel.
Then you get a long weekend, and read a short story collection wherein one of the stories hands you the solution to your story's problem on a silver platter, and you decide to mostly ignore what you've written already on the story--except for the really good bits and the general outline--and start over, with the new solution. So you begin to write at about, oh say, eight o'clock in the evening.
(I hope everyone reading this realizes that at some point this changed from a general-you to a second-person narrative.)
Then all of a sudden it's three-thirty in the morning and you have an 8k word newly written short story.
I have no idea where those eight hours went, but I'm really, really pleased with the results. I was not kidding when I said this is a story I've been trying to write forever--I had a stupid novel planned around the concept when I was in high school that never got off the ground, even. And it's a short story series! I've never really understood those, but man, I'm starting to. I did really try to poke this into novel territory, because how does one even go about selling a series of short stories, but it did not want to go. Some of the later stories might be novel-fodder, but this one was very insistent that it was a longish short story, thank you very much.
So now I have an 8k-word fantasy short story. Obviously it'll need editing, but in some ways I'm just pleased it finally exists. I hope I can sell it, because I have the same good feeling about it that I did "Well Enough" (of course, I also had that feeling about the story that's circulating now, and it got rejected by its target market, so take my "feelings" with a grain of salt. I do!). If nothing else, maybe I'll get the urge to write the later stories in the series and they'll sell.
In related awesome news, I've broken my own highest wordcount in one sitting record! Out of the 8k words of the short story, 5500 words were brand new, written today, which ups my highest-ever daily word count from 5000 to 5500. Shiny happiness for a writer who loves high daily wordcounts!