I’ve been working on “Conduit” for over a week now. It’s a tricky story, and not entirely clear to me, which is probably my issue in writing it. I’m also battling spoiling by my muse in which my last two stories came out as close to a perfect first draft as I can expect right now. So this one is just going to have to be a crappy first draft. Damn perfection!
I refuse to move onto the next story until this one’s done. I don’t want to lose what I’ve discovered. I’ve also learned that my freewriting in trying to learn about Madison (the main character) is helpful during the freewriting, but the handwriting is so bad I can’t salvage what I don’t remember writing down. It’s an interesting exercise. But the story is more involved that what I originally intended. It’s not just finding an alien’s kidnapped symbiont, it’s helping the alien she believes murdered her father, it’s learning that the truth is often hidden until one has the right perspective, and it’s about a woman accepting that her father wasn’t just disappointed by her – he never loved her.
And it’s almost down in crappy first draft form. uplifting, right?
DAWN BONANNO 