One day about two weeks ago our electric was flickering on and off, so I shut down the computer. Not wanting to entirely waste my writing time, I went through my old file folders from five or six years ago and found some stories that I'd never submitted. Ahem, to be truthful, they weren't fit to be subbed.
I picked three of the stories that looked the most promising and started working. One flash piece just need a bit more focus, another story had bits of dialogue and a very vague outline, and another just needed some description added and a bit of spit and polish. All three have been kicked out the door and into the world of slush piles.
And yes, I still have a stack of stories sitting beside the computer to work on along with working my way through the computer files to see what needs work and what needs to be kicked out the door. I did a lot of writing last year, but didn't sub as much as I should have. Hope to do better this year.
How about you, what do you do when the computers are down and that writing bug is gnawing away at you? And how many stories do you have lurking in folders, on and off the computer, that just need a bit of polish?
4 comments:
Just today I was using some pages from a half-finished novel as scrap paper. Happened to read some of it--embarrassingly awful stuff! Although it did reinforce that I've come a long way in the last two years.
I've probably got a dozen stories just sitting around. Sometimes I'll take a little nugget from a story and flip into a flash piece. Other times I'll just use a character or a setting or even a couple of lines of dialog and start afresh. There are some that go through a dozen iterations and end up never leaving the hard drive.
I've got a story with a Teddy Bear getting violated but it's to scrawny to be set free.
But I appreciate my beta readers feedback.
I have a couple of longish stories that need to be re-written so as to actually make sense and I have two incomplete books sitting off to the side that I need to work on as well.
For the moment, I'm re-writing a story that I last worked on about a year ago, only because when I was getting ready to submit, I decided to give it a quick read through, and unfortunately I got lost while reading it.
Now if I get lost while reading my own story, I can just imagine someone else getting just as lost reading it as well.
I can understand that "not leaving the hard drive", Chris! Some of those old stories I read and thought, "what was I thinking?".
You really should unscrawny that story, Brian, and get it out there! Those damn Teddy Bears keep popping up in my head!
Isn't it funny how something makes perfect sense when you write it, G, then when you reread it weeks later, not so much. I think when we're writing we see so much more than actually gets written down. I tend to forget that the reader can't see what's inside my head, only what I put down on paper. Fatal flaw.
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