Monday, December 22, 2008

Two Steps Foward, One Step Back

So by the time I went to bed Sunday night, The Faceless Ones was up to 4,700 words. The limit for the Devil's Food anthology is 7,500 and I was worried that I wasn't going to have room to finish the story without rushing things. Today at work while driving around my gigantic bomb of a truck (I drive a fuel tanker) I was mulling things over and hit upon a way to not only speed the action along, but do it within the word limit. This required a minor rewrite of a few scenes and the total deletion of about 700 words, but I am happy with the result. The tale now stands at just over 4,000 words. Being zonked, I'm going to let it rest for the evening, but tomorrow I hope to get cracking on the last third of the story, which of course is where things get nasty and owing to the theme of the anthology, people get gobbled.

On a somewhat unrelated note, I have decided to keep the working title The Faceless Ones. Yes it is also the name of a Patrick Troughton Doctor Who story, but the more I think about it, the more I realize the title works on two different levels for my own piece. Thus, it stays.

3 comments:

Jamie Eyberg said...

I have been working (and am still working) on my Devil's Food submission longer than just about any short story I have ever started. I really want to get this one right. BTW I am putting a link to your blog on mine. I think my readers will like you.

Rob Brooks said...

I'm having a really rough time starting a story for this anthology. Don't know why. People as food seems like a really fun premise, I just can't come up with anything. Good luck with yours.

Jameson T. Caine said...

Yeah, the idea behind the anthology seems pretty spiffy, but damn, I sure have had a hard time coming with an idea I liked.

Jamie, thanks for the link. :)