I just finished (the first draft of) a short story! Huzzah!

And it actually stayed short! Huzzah again! (I tend toward long-windedness, fictionally speaking. Or perhaps it's only that, being newish at this, I have yet to learn how to judge the best fit between idea and narrative length.)

Anyway. I feel like it's a good story, although that feeling made fade by morning. It's certainly different, if nothing else. The disconnect between the feeling in my head and what got on the paper at the end (especially) got kind of big, but I did the best I could. Hopefully, a little distance will illuminate the problem (and, one hopes, a solution.)



I'm totally making asking that Ben read it when he gets home.

1. I finished a short story last night. Yay! I don't know if it's any good yet. I'll let it sit until next week, read it again, and see.

2. We have guests coming over tonight, so I am cleaning like a fiend. Every time I do this, I think that if I just kept on top of it, I wouldn't have to scramble every time we have people over. And yet. Here I am scrambling again. If only my default setting were neater.

3. After 1000 requests and years of crappy half-assed "fixes" to our numerous bathroom problems (most of which are the result of the building being 90ish years old), the Slumlords have sent over a guy who is actually tearing the room up and reconstructing it rather than slapping a patch on. Even though this severely restricts my leaving the apartment for the next few days, I am thrilled. The big hole in my shower (which looked into the scenic basement - drafty!) is now a new wall of tile. Yay!

4. And the tiny person is begging for release from his crib, so I guess computer time is over.

I had a few slow days on the novel, so I took a break to work on a short story I started some time back, which had been marinating, barely begun, for some time now. I worked on it for the last few days, and the first draft is 5,251 words, 2219 of which were written tonight. Now I need to let it sit for a few days and see if it makes sense or not. It just feels good to finish something, perhaps because I am in the Dreaded Middle of the book. It's also nice to know I can write something under 10,000 words, because I was starting to wonder.

While working on the short story, tentatively titled "Dead Letter Dave," I came to the conclusion that the reason I was getting sort of low word counts on the book was that I am now in Uncharted Territories. I had a (very) vague idea of where I wanted to go with this book, and I have reached what I thought would be the end, and it's not. More stuff needs to happen for there to be a satisfactory resolution. Some stuff I have an idea about, and some I really don't. This book just sort of happened because I wanted to find out what happened before the book I initially intended to write.* I only had a character or three, a need to know what made one of them the guy he is later on, and a vague starting point and a vague ending point. I thought I might write a little short story** to explain Brennig to myself a little better. Well, 50,000+ words in, I am definitely getting to know him a little better, and hopefully learning something about this whole writing thing. I can definitely see that I'll need to do some major revisions.*** But! Soldier onward, maintain the forward momentum, etc. etc.

But it's nice to take a short story break, too.



*I might just do an outline for that one.

**A hollow laughing.

***Is it odd to look forward to those?