March Radness - Day 14

So, today, I don't feel like I got that much work done, not as far as writing goes. I recorded a short story (someone else's), finished another podcast, and I compiled the entire story I wrote for March, which has the tentative (and pretty lame) title "Who Can It Be Now?"* The good news is, it is complete, from start to finish. The bad news is, it clocks in at 7211 words, and the anthology I wrote it for requires stories that are 5000 words or less. So . . . that's vexing.

The deadline isn't for months, so I will probably put this story away, and then get it out in a few weeks, do a recording of it for my peeps, and then hack away at the tale until I get it down to speed. Honestly, it can only improve the piece to lose 1500 words of dialogue between the characters. It's that other pesky 700 words that I'm worried about.

After that, I opened up my notebook and typed up yesterday's bit of "Balms & Sears" writing, and then just continued on from there. I was making it up as I went along, which I am loathe to do, and I can't decide if the uncle is going to be a bad guy or a good guy.** He was certainly MEANT to be bad, but now I'm not sure which is better.

The homeless guy who always sits in the same booth at the library (and sometimes sits in his usual spot at the twenty-four hour Del Taco in town) had fallen asleep, and was snoring in a most disturbing, not-at-all-amusing sort of way. It kept distracting me from what I was supposed to be doing, like when you'd go to church and the young couple in the row behind you are dry-humping (I can't be the only one who experienced that, right?), and had to have bothered everyone else on that floor . . . and yet nobody walked over to wake the guy up or ask him to change his sleeping position.

I got in a few words on that project, and then left the library with a sense of satisfaction, even though the prospect of me finishing "Balms & Sears" does not seem likely. The Vegas odds are pretty embarrassing, actually.

But hey, never tell me the odds.

Words Today: 710
Words Total: 10,431

*Dang, I gotta come up with something better than that. Maybe I'll toss the story to a reader or two to see what they suggest.

**At last month's writers conference, one of the panels I went to detailed the Tropes of Sci-Fi & Fantasy. And one of the clichés they pointed out was The Evil Uncle. That it was a trope didn't occur to me until that panel, and it didn't occur to me that I was using it until just now.