Victory and Failure

Victory because I finished the first draft of a short story this morning. Failure because I sat down to write something in the flash fiction category for a market like The Drabblecast and it ended up being 5,000 plus words. I don’t think I’m ever gonna get that brevity back – that ability to tell a good and satisfying story with an economy of words. Maybe I should stop trying.

Well anyway, a first draft is done and now its time to put it away and let it simmer for a month or two. Cook on its own, let it develop beyond my preconceived notions of what it’s suppose to be. When I come back to it, with fresh eyes, I can focus on what I actually wrote and not what I tried to write. It’s a process. Forget what you expect and fine tune what you have. Hopefully there is enough good stuff on the page, between what you wanted and what’s really there, to mold it into something worth reading.

Submitted a few reprints the other day. Something I have not done in a while. I have some unpublished short stories but as I read through some of them, it’s pretty clear why they didn’t get published. Kind of reminds me of those commercials you see every once in a while for an album or collection by an aging or pasted away musician, claiming to contain previously unreleased tracks / songs. And when you get the opportunity to listen to some of those previously unreleased titles, it doesn’t take but a few moments to hear why they have gone unreleased. A turd is a turd no mater how you package it. We all create them. I guess the trick is to know the difference.


...and yes, I know that these pictures have nothing to do with my blog post - I just really like them.