Two Stories Completed
For me, Mr. Procrastinator Extraordinare, producing anything in its entirety is a coup. So completing two--yes, two!--short stories in a month’s time is a feat beyond belief for me. I hadn’t written a complete short story in so long, I thought I had forgotten how. My wife still shuffles around the house in her bunny slippers with a look of amazement on her face. My kids bounced up and down and clapped their hands, crowing ‘You did it Daddy!" over an over again, which made me feel like a movie star who was about to accept an Oscar or some other award.
But I did it.
With the use of my new, handy-dandy Write It Now software I actually outlined, plotted and wrote two entirely complete tales. Marketable tales mind you. Not merely rough drafts. I did those too. It took me about a week of outlining and brainstorming to plot out each story, then another week each to draft out the story. By then, I was needing some time away from the tight confines of my tiny broom closet work space, so I took a week off. I read some AlienSkin submissions, watched some god-awful movies on TV. I surfed the net for mindless stuff, like bikini babes, beauties in the wild, beauties in lace on linen, etc. That kind of stuff. I took the wife to dinner. Took the kids to Chuckie Cheese and to a cartoon movie at the Cineplex. I snoozed, ate junk food, downed a Yingling or two . . . or three.
Then I got the urge to write again. Yep, I did. It wasn’t THE urge to work on the novel again, but it was a urge to revisit the two short stories I had recently whipped up. So I slipped back into my closet, tapped my pinup girl on the fanny as I closed the closet door, and I pulled up the first story. I reread it, made some edits, formatted it and moved it out of my Work-In-Progress folder to my newly created Short Story folder. Finito.
Story two took three days to revamp and complete. But it too advanced to the new folder.
One story weighed in at 1,000 words exactly and the other breached 1,500 words. Not novella lengths by any means. But they mean I can scan the markets and get my name out there before editors again. Wahoo.
I’ll let you know how it goes once I send them out to markets this week.
