This is my typical thing when it comes to blogs: write a few posts, then take a break, and find that it's been a month or so since I last updated. It's a pattern I've been perfecting for years; with it I can create the illusion that I have a very busy existence. And everybody knows that a busy existence is an interesting existence.
Actually I have been a bit busy, but the aspect of interest is debatable. I've applied and interviewed for a few jobs recently; the first I was offered but turned down, having realised my aims and goals would have not made me the best fit for the role, the second I didn't get (and that's quite okay), while the third...well, the third I've only just applied for. I had told myself that if I weren't to get the second job (an alternative role in my current place of work) then it'd be enough of a spur to get me into job searching again, from which I'd taken a break - and so here I am again, much like last year, on the quest for new career options.
With that, I've managed to take a bit of a break from writing. I've done a little bit of editing regarding my current project, but I haven't really increased the 15,000 words I'd reached about the last time I updated. And of course I write "15,000 words" as if that total in this first draft will translate to the same total in the final version. It most likely will be pared down or reworked - and so it should. Compared to my novella manuscript (that nebulous object I keep mentioning and never actually describing), I don't feel enough has happened to justify 15,000 words - and I certainly don't want this story to be a struggle to get into. We've all read the beginnings of stories like that and invariably the beginnings are as far as we've bothered to go: a story should tell itself and do so in a compelling way, not bludgeon its audience into continued reading. I don't, though, want to go back and do proper edition right now - that can wait for the end of the draft. It's just a good thing for me to know, right now, that I need to focus not merely on telling my story and building a word count, but that those words I use must be meaningful and the story well-paced.
There's a "short short story" competition currently open with North & South magazine here that I believe I'd like to enter, but the catch is the story, being suitably short, must be no greater than 300 words. That's going to have to be an excessively well-paced tale without too much waffle, and given I have 15,000 words of (maybe not enough) substance, working to that kind of limit is going to be difficult.
But I do have an idea as to what it is I'd like to submit: a short story I've been working on for a while now, actually, which I keep picking up and putting down, in large part because I know how it's going to end but the path it must take to get there is relatively undefined (I've mentioned before that stories being told without a pathway for me tend to become waffle-shops, and even if that isn't readable to an outside mind it remains quite prominent in my own). It'll give me a chance to condense the text a bit, or a lot, and perhaps be a fore-runner to an actual published version of the story in general one day. It'd be good exposure, if I were to win - though I'm sure the competition is stiff and the odds of beating my competitors are probably ridiculously against me. But, as the notion goes, if you don't move you go nowhere.
Wish me luck!
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