#amwriting

So I finished the rough draft of what's turned out to be a not-so-short story I've been working on. It clocks in at 15,733 words. I'll still go through it with edits and trim it down, but man, it sure took on an unexpected life of its own! What started out as a really simple idea quickly blossomed into a whole lot of worldbuilding and backstory, and while not all of that will make the final cut -- and I don't know what I'm going to do with it whenever there actually IS a "final cut" -- I had a lot more fun with it than I ever expected.

I decided I wanted to revisit the creatures that are seen in my short story "You've Been Saved," which is part of my short story collection, "Hauntings." While the finer details about these creatures, such as where they came from or their intention, isn't disclosed in "You've Been Saved," I decided to take a cue from screenwriter/director Christopher Moore's film adaptation version, and expand upon it from there.

The idea came while I was walking my dog. She is an endless fount of unbridled hyperactive energy, so when the weather's nice, I try to take her out for an hour or so every day, and often use that time to work on story ideas in my head. I developed the concept and built upon it during one such sojourn, but once I began writing, it went in unexpected directions, and before I knew it, what was meant to be a simple, fairly straight-forward short story had swelled into something pretty complex.

With the first draft out of the way, now the hard part begins: the endless rounds of self-editing to trim it into some semblance of a finished product I can hopefully submit somewhere!