Thursday, January 1, 2009

Time Will Tell

So I was looking over the Time's Edge Anthology guidelines when inspiration hit me. Years back I began a time travel story that I was never able to finish. Finding a way to connect everything in my head just never came together, so I never got beyond the first couple thousand words. Still, the idea has been floating around in my mind ever since and I decided to look it over again. This time it all came together quite nicely, causality violations and all. I realized that I would have to start from scratch, which I did, only keeping the first few paragraphs more or less as they were.

Then I sat down and started to write. And write. And write. The tale just poured out of me. There was never any moment when I had to sit and mull things over. I knew exactly where it was going and exactly what was going to happen at every moment. Talk about an awesome feeling. Too bad crafting a story couldn't always be like that! In the end, I churned out 5,000 words damn near, though I have to be honest and say it needs a serious revision in order to shine. I need to force myself to wait a few days before doing that, so I am not so attached to the things that are crap and believe me, right now its somewhat crappy. I tend to pound things out in order to get the ideas on paper and then go back later and make them clean and smooth to the best of my ability.

So this untitled tale (the original name was The Transcendental Man, but I'm not sure about keeping it) goes on the back burner for a few days or more. Tomorrow and over the weekend I will turn my attention to my idea for Dead Bait, which came to me the other day while driving around at work.

2 comments:

Jamie Eyberg said...

I like the title. Sounds like something P.K. Dick would put down (or Cate). Good luck with Bait.

K.C. Shaw said...

I like the title too. It sounds interestingly oldschool SF. :) I'll have to check out that anthology too--I think I have a time travel story languishing on my hard drive that I really need to revise.