Finishing a 'masterpiece' and other uninteresting personal tangents.

I don't feel I will ever be able to write another great story again. There of course lies the problem in being consumed by the process of creating a good piece. I get so into the story that I live and breathe every word and sentence. When I come up for air I am rattled by the fact that I may have reached a pinnacle. Even though I know that this is not the case. At this point in time I'm still just some chump prattling away on his keyboard that nobody has ever heard of before.

By nobody, even as a regular person a lot of people haven't heard of me. Some of the old comrades in high school were Brad who-ing me even after 6 years together. I swear I have been introduced to this one guy at university about 5 times. He always seems to forget my name. Even though we sat together for an entire semester and I shared some of my witticisms. I think I have one of those faces too. I often get confused for other people. For 18 months at a previous job I got called 'Ben' by some of the folks. Even after correcting them after every time and the fact that the badge hanging from my front pocket said 'Brad'. Those were the biggest clues one should take that my name is not Ben.

I have so many ideas in my head, I need to be able to let a few go every now and again. Even if they don't live up to my expectations, at least it will be one less idea buggering my brain hole to be set free. Often they never do, the way of things is that they exceed or go under or are exactly expected (which is almost never the case). Everything I write turns different to my original vision. Not entirely though. I will establish a voice at the beginning and try to keep it consistent throughout the prose unless some story development dictates I should alter it. What happens afterward is that especially with the short stories I've wrote I will write to a goal. Keeping in mind some of the points I have to hit along the way.

The latest short story I polished. Let's call it 'The Release' which was the working title up until I decided it was too generic. I wrote it at the start of April and finished it completely earlier today. The first draft of the piece was written in about 4 hours. After I had hit the end I wanted, I went over and read it quite a few times tweeking it along the way.

The major edit which lead beyond the vague line between draft numbers with computers came along after laying down some goals to improve it. Mainly prose and dialogue. I filled in holes and inserted everything I thought was needed to get to the end. So the 2nd draft was basically expansionary.

In the '3rd' draft which I will call completely over last night and this morning. I printed out the document and went to town with a highlighter and pen. Chopping out all the fat in the story, making sure I was spot on with tense, grammar and spelling. I often found ways of streamlining the prose to say whats needed in an efficient way. I ended up with a 5% reduction on a 3000 word story.

I went into such detail I would usual just gleem over and not notice. That after multiple corrections and multiple crumpled and reprinted pages, finding a comma instead of a fullstop is almost enough for me to start biting my fingers until they're white. Overall I am extremely happy with the outcome. I think it's the best serious short story that I have written. It's lean, mean and has a good forward thrust for plot. As always I aim for originality, for things I haven't seen or read before.

It's the first one in the goal this year of 5 short story submissions. That is five different stories, not the same one to five different places. Submitting to either competitions or magazines.

I've got this one packed and ready to post Monday morning. I'm sending it off to a competition that has more of a literary flare, so I've kept that in mind while writing this. The Release gleems the boundaries that separate genre writing to literary. It contains a spirituality, an almost supernatural element. I felt it important to drop hints that there is both a 'real' and a supernatural interpretation of how events unfold. So the pessimists and pretentious that are literary folk can be satisfied. While I can sneak a speculative piece into their hands.

The second short story I wrote last month has to go through at least a few more passes. It's humorous, some folk who I palmed it off to to read have literally laughed out loud. So I take it as a good sign. I know I can still improve on it, and bring it up to a really professional level. I may film flam around a bit at the start while I was finding my footing. The end is pretty neat already. I have my eye on an Australian magazine that it could fit in with. Surprisingly this doesn't contain much in terms of speculative fiction. More fun nonsense. I was about to work on this when I had the 'I can't write' niggles so I decided to write a blog post instead.