Monday, December 13, 2010

[State of The Writer] I'm semi-rocking it

Let's see... I stated last Monday that I wanted to write a completely new short story "Rabbit Heart" for the 20 Spec Anthology. The goal has been met. At a little able 4,000 words I have a very rough draft. The issue is that there is no direction, no spine to it. The story is a cephalopod at the moment, wrapping its tentacles around every possibility without deciding on one.

This week's challenge will be inserting the spine [direction] and I have an idea on how to do that [it involves the MC's hair]. I even know how I will manage to stay below the 5,000 word restriction, which I feared I would pass. It was a very helpful post by Matt Delman [HERE] The post addresses steampunk as a genre, but it has sage advice "if it doesn't serve a purpose, get rid of it", something I need to do with my pretty descriptions.

In addition to this I want to start on my Lovecraftian horror story set in Japan.

Last week, I said that I will be editing my novel. So far Chapter 1-12 are the ones I managed to edit. Wordcount-wise that is 15,000 words in the novel. I write short chapters, because I feel that the shorter the chapters the faster the novel will be read. This illusion of a fast pace is what I need since the build-up towards the action is slow and that is a bit fatal with UF as a genre. At the least the Buffy sub-category of it [not that I am writing a Buffy story, no, I'm writing a Willow story].

Among getting on board & editing three chapters this week [modest goal because all the other chapters are written in a journal and have to be transcribed AND edited], I will have to actually administer the changes on Chapters 10 to 12, because I had to rearrange dialogue and some info-dumping AND did those on paper.

Like last week, I aim to write a story for the Friday Flash. I think people really do like my funny superhero.

BUSY week ahead. What are your plans?

2 comments:

Charles Gramlich said...

A couple of years ago I reviewed a collection of Japanese Mythos stories translated into English. SOme were really good, although the title story was very long and slow.

Harry Markov said...

I looove Japanese myths, though I've just come around to reading about their creatures and where they have been featured. Sounds divine.