swan_tower | Four for four!

"The Moon and the Son"

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Even shorter than I thought it might be, which is both good (it means I was able to finish it today, despite stalling out Thursday and doing nothing Friday) and bad (it's really more the skeleton of the story than the story itself). But hey, it's done, and first drafts are allowed to suck. I think I wanted to be writing something else, but nothing suggested itself, and I wasn't about to start something new with only a day to complete it.

So. Four short stories in four weeks; good for me. "The Deaths of Christopher Marlowe," "Waiting for Beauty," "Degrees of Heresy," and "The Moon and the Son." (Hmmm -- maybe "A Heretic by Degrees," instead. Still not settled on a title for that one.) I realized, looking back at my records, that I needed this challenge more than I thought; in the fourteen months or so prior to starting it, I'd written a whopping three stories. (Marketable things; I'm not counting two very brief bits written for games.) Sure, there was a novel in there, but what about the months that weren't spent on the novel? What about the days when I could write both at once? Three stories is beyond pathetic.

I don't feel up to Jay Lake's standard of a short story every week, without fail, but then again, the man also wrote a novel at a speed that makes even The Vengeance of Trees, my seven-week novel, look lazy. On the other hand, I can do better than three stories a year. I think I might try keeping to a standard of one a month. I can manage that, right? I think that if I just sit down with Peter Pan for a while, I can write "The Last Wendy," and then I really want to come up with a Changing Sea short story for Clash of Steel's pirate issue. (Certain individuals I know might want to take note of that, too.) We'll see if I can manage it, but really, I ought to be able to.

Now, however, I shall take a break, and try not to start mentally revising something already.