Month: February 2021

This past week I nearly screwed up.

I wrote a short story for an anthology with a deadline of February 14^th – and no, it wasn’t a romance :).

I had a couple of other projects with deadlines on the 14^th, and for once focused on one at a time. My usual approach has been to work on everything at once, and we all know how that tends to work out.

By Saturday evening I had the story under control, and estimated I needed another five hundred words or so to finish it. Gauging the number of words to the end is something that just happened when I did the story a week challenge last year. I’ve been within a couple of hundred words in those estimates and a quick burst of writing on Sunday morning got me over the finish line and on the upper side of the estimate.

I read through the story, sorted out spelling and punctuation and ended up with just over 2,500 words. I transferred it into proper manuscript format, checked the submission guidelines. 

And crap!

The minimum submission length was 3,000 words. Somewhere in my head I recalled the minimum as 2,000.

I’d kicked around two or three other ideas for this anthology none of which had enough structure in my mind to pull three thousand words together in a few hours.

Did I mention I’d also promised to grill steaks for a Valentine’s dinner?

There was no point in submitting the story as it was – automatic rejection, so, I printed a hard copy of the story, sat down with the dogs on either side, ready to offer advice, and looked at what I’d written. As I read through I didn’t try to edit and restructure the story or replace word order. I tried to really put myself in the head of my main character, think about what she would see, smell, hear, feel, and touch. The five senses that add depth and and richness to the descriptions of where she is and what’s happening.

I think it was less than an hour later that I took the notes I’d scribbled over the margins and between lines, updated the manuscript and realized I now had over 3,000 words.

Yes, you can overthink the editing process, but in this case, editing wasn’t changing the way the story was written. It was adding depth to hopefully help my reader stay connected to the story. 

If you’d asked me two weeks ago if I could do that, I would have said no. 

Now I know I can do that with a story

I’ll let you know what happens.

Technical issues on this site prevented updates during the remainder of January. I spent some time with the iPower support team and they tell me the issue is resolved, although I’m still seeing some odd behavior on the site.

As a result of the technical issues the updates I had planned for January are now pushed to February which is already pretty crowded.

There was no progress on the paperback version of Thieves in the Temple. It requires a block of dedicated time in Affinity Photo and to be honest I’ve had more fun with Death at a Wedding and writing three of the five short stories for the Portals Collection which will be published either later in February or early March. I wrote just over 20,000 words in January, the most in a month since April 2020, so I’m quite pleased with that progress and just need to keep it up for the rest of 2021!

I also laid out my 2021 publishing plan in January. At the moment it’s in an Excel spreadsheet but I will be moving it to the new version of Aeon Timeline as part of my version 3 beta testing. The new mind map option in Aeon 3 looks to be very powerful. I have some ideas on some non-standard uses for it, and will let you know how it works out.