2024 is my year of short stories. In this weekly series, I talk about the stories I’m working on, from idea and draft to submission.
- Stories in Progress – 1
- Submissions This Week – 1
- Submissions Currently Out – 3
- Rejections This Year – 2
Thanks to a failure of scheduled posts, this is going out on a Wednesday night, not a Monday morning. Oops…
Torpedo Away
As I mentioned last week, I was waiting for final notes from my wife on the revised version of “The Incident at Pleasant Hills.” She gave me that feedback, and I ended up spending another few days editing again.
However, I finally decided that enough was enough, and sent it out. I’m sure I could go through it another five times and change another word here or there, but eventually you just have to admit it’s about as good as it’s going to get and move on to something new.
Something New
Hopefully, now that I’m really, truly done with Pleasant Hills, I can spend more time this week figuring out what to work on next. Oddly, because I had a few stories ready to send out and one in progress, this is the first time this year that I’ve had to sit down and begin something new.
I poked and prodded at “Portrait of the Artist in Wartime,” which is still theoretically the next story on the docket. I still like the idea, but I realized this week that I don’t yet have everything I need to make it into a proper story. The central conflict is conspicuously absent. I’m going to need to solve that problem, or else find a different story to work on.
To that end, I sifted through my old writing files, looking for other half-baked ideas and drafts that might inspire me. There are a few that I would like to revisit, but I didn’t have any epiphanies.
Goals for Next Week
Just one: decide on the next project and put together an outline.
Words Deferred 