Tuesday, August 18, 2009

The Way We Were

Things are back to normal around here. This means that my back is in near constant pain from the day job, The Other Half is not satisfied with the speed I am accomplishing household chores, I can't seem to get enough sleep, no one wants to cook and...oh yeah, rejections are once again rolling my way. Hey, the ride was fun while it lasted, but it's back to reality for me. At least duotrope doesn't snicker when I report rejections as opposed to its snarky response to my acceptances.

After brainstorming like mad the last few days with help from The Other Half, I've got several good ideas for short stories. When push comes to shove, she can be quite inventive with her settings and scenarios. Of course, it's almost always left up to me to come up with an ending. Tonight I wrote a good 800 words on a new monster story and then promptly deleted them all. They were good, I suspect, but I could see that I was going to go waaaay over my word limit if I began the story in that spot. Plus, I realized that I was beginning in the wrong spot and the scene I was so carefully crafting could easily be referenced easier in dialog later on once the spooky shit was going down. So I chopped them and then jumped forward and started the story where things get creepy.

Right now it's time for ice cream. Yum.

10 comments:

Fox Lee said...

I had coffee heath bar crunch tonight. You?

Jameson T. Caine said...

Chocolate crunch or something like that. Basically it was vanilla with crunchy bits of chocolate.

Cate Gardner said...

How dare they reject you... We were fashioning you into an Acceptance God.

Barry Napier said...

You just described why I don't use the Duotrope tracker...

Alan W. Davidson said...

Glad to hear of the normality (sorry about the back). I wish my Other Half came up with story ideas for me...

Jamie Eyberg said...

I was rooting for you on the acceptance front. I was hoping you would break records this month. There is still a couple of weeks left.

Anonymous said...

I have that problem too, where I begin the story way too early. I've tried to do what you explained, but I just haven't figured it out quite yet.

So, I said what the hell, I'm writing a book.

Aaron Polson said...

Yeah, some stories want to be books. Other stories want to be stories. Some want to be flash.

Some don't know what they want, so I lock them in the furnace room until they play nice.

K.C. Shaw said...

You wrote 800 words and deleted them? YOU ARE A STRONG MAN! I hate deleting writing. I have several "cut bits" files where I stick scenes I've edited out.

I could use some ice cream right about now. The store's still open...

Danielle Birch said...

Ice cream helps with rejections. And 800 words is a hell of a lot more than I did last night.