Dreamland D2 done

Dreamland D2 done

I’ve completed getting the latest Pa’adhe short story down. Draft 2 had all my extraneous comments, guides, notes, and cross-outs in it. I’ve now started Draft 3, which has had all that removed as well as a very brief, first pass round of tweaking. Just little bits here and there. So, Dreamland should be getting published to this blog sometime this month, depending on what my Alpha-Betas think of it.

This short story has been an interesting journey. They all are, and I enjoy each one, but this one is unique in it’s length and what it deals with. There may be more like this in the future, maybe not. Dreamland will only be Pa’adhe short story number 6 when it’s posted. Who knows what’s next or how many there will be?

First some numbers….

When I completed Dreamland D2 I had a word count of 11,053. As I mentioned in my previous post, this is a longish short story, but it came in well short of being a novella. Removing all the extra stuff I mentioned above, Dreamland D3 came in at a 10,049 words. That’s a reduction of a mere 947 words. I shouldn’t say “mere” since any writer will tell you that’s a bit of work as far as word count goes. I think the average word count a writer strives for is about 800 words a day, making that more than a day’s worth of work tossed, if you will. I know for my purposes, I track my day’s work at 800 words.

I’m happy with the story. I think the ending could use some tweaking, but then so can bits and pieces throughout the story, so that’s good. That’s the whole point of revisions and multiple drafts.

One interesting thing about this writing episode is that I had written a rough poem of some 14 stanzas, 4 lines each, trying to write out what I wanted to have happen to Cook. I got the Dreamer reciting her Dream as an epic poem and got carried away, outlining in that poem all that I wanted to have happen to Cook. It was not properly composed, though it did have rhythm and a certain word style and flow. Initially, I planned to have Cook’s back story presented as a song. In the end, as of D3, most of that has been removed from the actual storytelling that will be getting posted. The stuff is all there, it’s just no longer being presented as a long poem.

The reason I mention this is about three days after I’d done that, I came across a write-up, I think about Tolkien, that included the suggestion to write it out as poetry as a break and to get the creative juices flowing again. While I didn’t need to do it “to get the creative juices flowing again” I was tickled pink to see that suggestion. Two or three of you that read this blog will understand why. You know who you are.

Hmmm. Maybe someday I’ll write a Pa’adhe story as if a bard were singing it in some ale house. That could be fun.

Now I set Dreamland aside for a few days and go do some reading and work on some photography. I’ve got a HDR I want to put together and a time lapse to shoot this weekend. When I come back to editing this short story, probably next week, I’ll be seeing it afresh and should catch any glaring fixes I need to do.

This may be my shortest blogging in the last year!

Dreamland is different

A lot has happened, writing-wise, ham radio-wise, and photography-wise since my last blog post. Not to mention weather-wise!

You may recall that in my last post, I mentioned the following two items:

“I actually already have the first third of the story”

and

“With Dreamland I’m concerned about two things.

First, it feels odd writing this way because that is how I tend to write my larger stories, the novella and novel size.”

I had no idea, apparently, where I actually was in the story when I wrote the above remarks. I don’t know, right now, if I’m a third the way through, half-way through, or what. Since those statements were made, I’ve upped my word count, and keep in mind it’s a rough draft at this point, to a whopping 7,544 words. That would be all well and good except I’ve not yet even resolved the main crisis. That to me indicates I can’t be much more than half-way through, for various reasons related to the storyline that I’m not going into here.

The story itself is going reasonably well. I’ve had the major issue and the various characters are currently struggling to get out of it. I’ve got my conflict, two of them actually. So just how many words is Dreamland going to be?

I believe this will still be a short story, albeit a longish one. Online resources put the upper limit at 20,000 words for a short story in an anthology. Between 15,000 and 90,000 is novella territory. I doubt I’ll end up with 15,000 words, but it just might be close to that. The rough draft could potentially bust 15,000 but I’m not worried since the inevitable tweaking and reviewing will cut that down. Thus, also by word count, it would support the idea that I’m about half-way through.

Word count aside, the critical thing at this point is…The story should be as long as it needs to be to tell the whole story. That is the overriding rule, and the one I will ultimately abide by.

I had also mentioned in the same previous post that Dreamland was “funny”. It still is, in that even though I had sort of kinda plotted out in my head what was going to happen, the crisis took a wicked bypass. It threw me a curve-ball, to throw in a baseball metaphor for a friend. I don’t know if it was my computer screen backgrounds that triggered my subconscious or what but when I finished writing up the latest bit of writing, two…avatars (for lack of a better word)…had been introduced.

It’s a little bit frustrating when that happens.

Here I was, happily writing, my mind racing along, around, over, under, doing circles, barrel rolls, with my typing frantically trying to keep up. Then just before my fingers rebel my mind decides that’s enough and stops. My typing catches up. I hit save, sit back, relax a moment, then look over what I’ve written. It looks great: the flow of the story, what’s happening, it all looks good. The writing could be tightened up here or there, I see a typo or two. I nod to myself, satisfied.

Then it hits.

I have two new items in this story that my readers are going to want me to describe or at least want to know more about. I can already see the feedback comments. Here I am, finally providing a visual description of the Captain and his crew so people will stop asking me about that and I’ve just added two more unknown personae? Why is Dreamland doing this to me?

Yep, Dreamland is definitely different. That’s good, too. It’s forcing me to stretch as a writer. I believe I’m getting good ideas, doing good writing, and slowly developing my characters over this series of Pa’adhe short stories. Each of these stories adds a little more to everything that’s happening, before or after a particular story, but each also opens up new vistas for what could be. None more so than Dreamland so far. It’s forced me to hit my limits and push through. Looking back with what I’ve got down so far, I’m pleased with it. Looking forward at what it’s going to take to finish Dreamland has me both nervous and excited.

At the same time, I wish it was done with so I could read it!

Note to self: Ramen is OK, but Udon is better! Especially thrown in with Orange Chicken.

New Pa’adhe Short – The Mercenaries

 

I have just posted my new Pa’adhe short story, The Mercenaries.

If you want to go devour the latest short story, by all means do so! I’ll still be here when you return.

The accent discussed in my previous post is gone. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when they saw that, including myself I must admit. Yet, there are still traces of an accent when Tharad talks. Ironically, this was more due to syntax than any attempt to reflect an accent in his speech. One of my last Beta readers caught this and pointed it out to me when I had the Captain make a remark. Her comment was to the effect that “the Captain is speaking with Tharad’s accent here.” I did a double-take when I read that and sure enough, he was. That line has been fixed, but the interesting point for me was that in some ways Tharad’s accent was still there, just not the one I had originally intended him to have. I’m not sure how that happened, but there it is.

Dreamland is the next Pa’adhe short story I’m writing. I’ve hit an interesting speed bump working on this one.

Normally, I write these short stories from the start to the finish. Also, I always get the whole story into D1 before I even start D2 and begin any serious editing. These two points are being subverted by this tale.

To begin with, I already have 4,799 words written for Dreamland. That’s great, right? Normally I would agree except this time probably 1,000 of those words are notes that got jammed into the story. This makes it hard for me to follow from start to end the actual story I’ve already written so that I can maintain continuity. Somehow, D1 became not only the story but also the note file for this story. Worse, these notes are mixed in with the story rather than being in a specific place like the very start or the very end as usually is the case.

The end result is that I had to move to D2 now, half-way through this new Pa’adhe short. My guess was pretty close: 3,692 words were left as the actual story after I made that jump to D2 and removed the notes. I had considered removing the story from a copy of D1 and re-naming the resulting file to be the note file, but I decided against that for no discernible reason. How the heck did this happen?

The other thing I wanted to bring up about Dreamland is that it is not following my normal writing style. As I mentioned earlier, normally I sit down, start writing, zone out, and the story unfolds from start to finish. That’s true whether I get my writing done in a full day’s work or over several days. Every short story so far has followed this order from start to finish. Every short story, that is, except Dreamland. Between what I’ve written so far and the notes I wrote in D1, I actually already have the first third of the story, the details that go into the middle, and the ending is already done.

It almost seems like cheating. It feels as if I were reading a story, jumped to the end to see how it ends, then jumped to the middle to see what interesting things might be happening between the end and where I was in my reading. That’s actually the order in which I wrote those three sections: first third, ending, middle notes.

With Dreamland I’m concerned about two things.

First, it feels odd writing this way because that is how I tend to write my larger stories, the novella and novel size. I have mentioned before I have a couple of these larger, non-Pa’adhe works on the back burner while I focus on these short stories for the time being. Those are so “big” that when I work on them I need to jot things down as soon as they come to mind, no matter where in the story they are or where I am in my writing. Otherwise, I fear losing those ideas or research and when the time comes not being able to remember what great action or event I had planned for this part of the story.

The second is that Dreamland is funny. I don’t mean funny-ha-ha but rather funny-uncertain. Could I be writing Dreamland the way I am because it really should be written as a larger story? Do I unconsciously realize I have a grander story to tell here than can be shoe-horned into a short story? Should this be 50,000 words instead of 5,000?

Consciously, I see Dreamland telling the back story of ONE of the persistent characters. It could easily be expanded to give the back story of all of them but I’m not sure I want to do that. Is that why it’s being written in such a different manner? The uncertainty derives from not knowing if it needs to be more than a short story. Or if it should give all the back stories instead of just one.

I don’t know. All I know is I’m working on Dreamland and when I get the time to sit and write this tale, I feel like I could just sit there and write it all out, if only I had the time. I almost feel if I could take a day or two off to do nothing but write, Dreamland would be done and it would be larger than any other story, Pa’adhe or otherwise, that I’ve yet put out.

It remains to be seen if all this is a maturing of my writing process, a subconscious perception of Dreamland, or mere happenstance.

All I can do, really, is write it and then see.

Now, if you read this first, go enjoy my new story, The Mercenaries, now.