Crazy Week

It’s been a crazy week since last Monday. It’s been an emotional roller coaster starting with the VP acceptance, the medical update on my Dad, work issues, and the upcoming WOTF deadline I just can’t seem to handle at the moment. The short story scene has been bugging me.

I think my editor’s eyes have developed well or taken a jump recently. Every short story I’m looking at is utter crap. To fix it would require 2+ weeks of my writing time based on available time, continuing with the novel, and my other responsibilities. I don’t want to submit crap. But I don’t want to skip a submission opportunity.

Someone suggested I take a previous Honorable Mention story and resubmit it under the new judge. I’m not comfortable resubmitting the same story twice, but this was a story I’d tabled for two years because of a massively thorough critique I’d received. Bear in mind, it wasn’t the critique itself that stopped me from revising; it was that the story needed more from me than I could give it at the time. So rather than waste a story I loved, I tabled it until I was ready.

I’ve been reading it, figuring what the core of the story is, and grew it from there. Most of the story has changed focus; a lot of the tangents I took are being cut. I need to extract the few paragraphs that uphold the central idea and then build around those, scene by scene. I’ve already reconstructed the outline, I just need to start working on the individual scenes. I wouldn’t do this for every crappy story I have now: this one sings to me. This one needs to see the world. I can’t explain why.

I could probably turn this one (eventually) into a novel based on what I know of the characters, magic and the troubles their land face socially and physically. But I don’t want this story to be that. This is about one young woman and how she dealt with some pretty bad events. I need to rewrite this.

So that’s my goal this week and then I’ll pick the novel up again, and only the novel until it’s complete. Novel writing works so much better when I’m not drafting or rewriting something else. I’m not going to submit this before I’m ready. If this isn’t ready, I do have something I can send in as plan B.

What are you facing this week that your brain and heart and pestering you on?