It’s official. I am way too old to be staying up all night partying. It took me about five days to recover from my adventures in the desert last weekend. Not that I even drank all that much. I was just so freaking tired. But whatever
I REGRET NOTHING!
That said, my writing did take a hit last week. It was Wednesday before I actually got up for my usual 5am writing session, and even then I was so foggy I couldn’t really concentrate to write. So I decided to take advantage of the time by culling some old pages that got cut from the last draft of my novel and see if maybe I could turn them into a short story worthy of submission to a journal or two.
When I started this story, it was all about this sassy girl named Sunday. Then, as the story evolved Sunday’s appearance in the story got pushed back, and then pushed again, and finally, at some point, it stopped being her story at all. In fact, she didn’t even belong in the story anymore. I was deeply reluctant to cut her, but as soon as I did, the story opened wide up. It was like I finally saw what I wanted to do with the narrative.
But the Sunday pages (as I’ve starte calling them) are still pretty good pages, and I have a lot of them. So on Wednesday morning I pasted them all into their own fresh Word doc and took a rough pass at trimming anything that referenced the larger story. When I was done I had 24 pages, which I promptly emailed to my writing group.
My hope is that with their help I can figure out a framework for Sunday’s story that will allow it to stand on it’s own. A little chocolate, a little wine, and five kick-ass story tellers brainstorming should produce at least a few ideas.
It would be nice to send something out into the world again. Having short stories published is a good confidence booster, and won’t hurt any when it comes time to start sending out queries to agents.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
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