Three whales this morning - they came out of the water enough that we could see there was one large and two small and think they might have been humpback whales. Vida pura, indeed.Lots of skipping around, often what I do when I’ve got several projects in the works.
So here’s the breakdown and total:
650 words on Circus in the Bloodwarm Rain
673 words on “Carpe Glitter”
534 words on “Prairiedog Town” (working title)
200 words and editing finished on a story in a semi-accepted state, plus sent off to the magazine that requested the changes.
Total word count: 2058
Not too bad, particularly when I’m working on getting back into productivity’s swing.
Today’s new words in Spanish: aire acondicianado (air conditioner), apogon (power outage), ballena jorabada (humpback whale), cafetera (coffeemaker), calambur (pun), picadura de mosquito (mosquito bite), la puerta de teja metallica (screen door), reinicializar (to reset, usually a machine).
And Wayne woke me this morning to watch three whales (we think a large humpback and two smaller ones) in the surf.
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"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
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Recent Writing Post Roundup
Writing and Novel Links Most of the revision and rewriting stuff has to do with the novel I’m currently working on. Hopefully, though, this is of use to those writing short stories as well as novels. Please let me know which you liked best, and if there’s writing topics you’d like to see touched on in coming weeks!
I'm always trying to add new writing tools to my toolbox; ways of plotting and replotting stories for rewriting are always useful.Here’s another example of using a Stumbleupon-discovered post to spur a rewrite.
The story I just finished, whose working title is “Villa Encantada,” is one whose beginning I wrote over a year ago. I picked it up last summer and added a couple of scenes, but something about it has felt wrong and it’s been just lumpy scenes stuffed full of description of a balcony garden. I was pretty sure it didn’t begin where it was supposed to, and also pretty sure that the best thing to do would be to start it again from scratch, write it, then mine the previous efforts to see what should get folded into it.
So when I read this post on plotting out stories, I decided to use it to plot out mine. All you do, according to the oridinal webpage, is complete the sentences. I’ve thought about the story and its theme and know it about halfway well enough, I think.
1. Once upon a time . . . there was a woman who could not forgive herself.
2. Every day . . . she tried to kill herself in the very smallest of ways, cigarettes and high heels on stairways.
3. Until this . . . she meets a new neighbor, who is bossy and ominous and presumptuous.
4. Because of this . . . she tries to make friends and allies in the rest of the apartment complex.
5. Because of this . . . The bitchy neighbor, who is a witch, attacks her in increasingly powerful ways, leading up to a third neighbor’s death.
6. Until finally . . . the protagonist is pissed off enough to stop feeling guilty and react in a way that saves herself.
7. For every day . . . I’m not sure what to do with this last, but I’ll wrap the story up with some gesture that shows that her forgiveness of herself is a lasting and life-changing thing.
Okay. That let me start thinking about it in terms of scenes, once I had the overall arc in my head. From there I did start from scratch and write the story from my head. In the process I found myself adding a frame story. Once I finally had that draft I could go through the first version and fold in passages that I wanted to keep. I’m still not happy with the end, but at least I have a complete story now that I can tinker with.
