Second Try

I finished my revision of "The Mind's Retreat" a few hours ago, and I will be mailing it to Leading Edge tomorrow. I ended up taking the story from about 11,000 words to a bit less than 9,000. Even more impressive when you consider the second draft of the story was more like 18,000 words.

The reason it was originally so long was that I didn't have any real direction in mind when I was first writing the story. I had this character in mind, I knew a whole lot about his life, and I ended up writing the first draft of the story as a highlights reel of the first 20 or so years of his life. Hell, the first draft started with his Baptism.

As I went on, I started focusing more and more on the latter half of the story, which was really the story I wanted to tell. It turned out that the first 5,000 pages or so were nothing more than an overly-long introduction, so I trimmed that out. I kept parts as flashbacks, and ended up trimming that, too.

Eventually, with the draft I was working from today, I had shortened the timeline of the story from 20 years to more like 6 months. And most of that was transit time in Interstellar Space that went wholly unmentioned. With this copy, I realized that even that was putting too much reliance on flashbacks, so I changed one part into a dream that was more described than shown (and in about 1/10th the time, as well, without missing anything important), and adapted another into a record another character was watching. So that now, the entire time frame of the story went from 20-something years to about 24 hours. And it still tells the story I wanted to tell, and probably does a better job than before.

I think this draft is a lot tighter, and I think I'll stick with it. Until I decide to revise it again.

-E. Maxfield Moen

Sigh...

I'm going over my story "The Mind's Retreat." I'd planned on giving it a quick-once over, shortening it down to about 10,000 words. Well, what started out as a quick editing process has turned into a full-blown new draft of the story. I realized that the narrative is rather wobbly in some places, and other parts that I didn't explain properly.

I got rid of one whole section that I thought was extraneous, and then I realized that another part, integral to the story, makes no sense without some of the background from the deleted section. So now I've got to work out some compromise that'll make everything clear without resorting to a long flashback that sends the plot to a screeching halt and really has no place in a short story.

Of course, if this results in a product superior to what it's replacing, then it's worth the effort. It's just I was hoping to send "The Mind's Retreat" out to a magazine today, and now I see it might be another day or two before I'm satisfied with it. In the meantime, I'm totally stuck on the story I was working on before, which is real annoying because I'm about 3/4 of the way through. I know where I want the story to go, just not how to get there.

Well, I'll keep slogging it out, and hopefully I'll have something worth sending out for publication soon. Keeping my fingers crossed.

-E. Maxfield Moen

New Story Idea

I have a new story I'm working on. No title yet, I'm only about halfway through the first draft. This one will be pretty short, probably about 4,000 words at most. I want this one to be somewhat satirical. It's not very light-hearted so far, but I plan on working on that after I get the first draft down.

In the meantime, I'm also working on tightening up "Where Do We Go From Here." I want to get it down to about 10,000 words, which means I gotta cut about 3,000 words from it. I've been finding bits of cruft to cut out here and there, stuff that I don't think is needed to tell the story the way I want it told. I'm also going to be doing that with my other stories, to widen the number of magazines I can send my stuff out to. That done, I'll get back down to researching magazines.

I have to admit I was a bit demoralized by the lack of venues available to me. This isn't the 50s, when pulp magazines could be found around every corner. I'm going to have to really plug away. I have to keep my chin up and not be daunted by the prospects.

I knew it would be hard work to get published, but knowing something and experiencing it are two different things. That's something I thought I'd learned by now, but life is a constant learning process.

Well, talking about it isn't going to get it done. I'd better get my nose back to the grindstone.

-E. Maxfield Moen