Back to fundamentals for me…
I’ve been working my way through rewrites of stories I started this summer. I picked up Gari’s story and rewrote almost the entire second installment. This week I’ll share his journey with my writer’s group and barring any more substantial rewrites, I’ll have more to share with you about how he’s doing in Torthal. I have high hopes for these characters and the setting. A couple of things I’m considering changing include some of the characters names, and the title for the story.
My next big project is related to Fantastic America, and Midwestern Magicians. As nanowrimo approaches, I plan to finish the work I started last year with at least a rough draft of book two in the series. I’ll keep on writing until I find my footing for the ideas I have outlined already. I love the version of our world in the Magic Unleashed series, and can’t wait to share the other worlds it leads to.
My other summer project was the Centriole. I wrote it for a monthly writing challenge, but it didn’t quite work for that. The story was imaginative and interesting, but it didn’t have a resolution in the five thousand word limit for the contest. Now that the challenge is over, I can overhaul the story and make it more satisfying to read. At least, that’s my plan for it right now.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Failure is often a great teacher though, and not winning or even placing in the challenge highlighted an area I need to work on. I write a lot of short stories, but they aren’t all that short. Strunk & White taught me in high school that, “Vigorous writing is concise.” One of my lessons learned this summer is that I need to work on the concise part.
A story should have a beginning, middle, and end. If I’m at four thousand words of a five thousand word story, I need to have a plan to wrap it up and make that ending worthwhile for my audience. For all the imagination the centriole contained, it did not end well. Ailish ended her story as if it were the intro to a longer piece (which it may still become) but that didn’t do any good for the contest or the readers who wanted an actual conclusion, myself included.
Stay tuned for more updates!