I don’t make ’em—at least not at the end or beginning of the year. If I want to change something, I just do it when it occurs to me.
It’s a nice crisp day here in southeast Texas. We’ve had enough rain recently that if our neighbors decide to shoot off fireworks, as they do occasionally, we don’t have to worry about anything catching on fire.
I received an invitation to submit a story to an upcoming anthology yesterday. When I read the guidelines, one of my fallow stories seemed like a perfect fit. I’ve been remiss about submitting stories lately, and I have about ten that are just sitting around. In part because I’ve found the number of good pro markets diminishingly small for these tales—I get tired of seeing the same short list come up when I do a search on duotrope. Maybe I need to expand my research to find other markets that I haven’t considered before.
Anyway, the story I had in mind was far too long for the guidelines, 6200 words when the stated maximum was 4000. I haven’t read the story in quite a while and I got to wondering: why is it so dang long? It’s not that complicated a story. So I started reviewing it and found that it was, indeed, horribly bloated with stuff that isn’t essential to the story. I started hacking away and I’ve already deleted over 700 words and I’m not 1/3 of the way through the story yet. I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t fit in 4000 words. There’s a lengthy aside that explains the nature of the main character—it brings the tale to a screeching halt two pages in. My first editing pass will trim this material extensively and the next one, if all goes according to plans, will pull it out altogether and distribute the essential elements throughout the story, conveying them through action rather than narrative as much as possible.
We watched a few more episodes of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour last night. Some of the humor is dated and feeble, but much of it is still funny (and relevant) after all these years.
