Playing and Editing

I had two points of inspiration for last week’s story: 1) self help books and 2) wanting to play with emotion and character interaction a bit. I’m fairly sure I paid tribute to both of those points, but I’m not at all sure I did it well. Which is fine, not every single story is going to be good. But it was pretty fun to write (except for the migraine I had while writing it) and I liked and could relate to the characters.

One thing I wish I could get better at is editing after I’m done with a story. I’m having an extremely hard time going back over the stories once I’ve finished them and wanting to do much of anything with them. This whole process of writing a story a week is pretty intense and also kicking my ass, which I naively was not expecting. So by the time I get done with a story, I’m done with it. Other than fixing typos and cutting obviously unneeded segments, I don’t want much else to do with it other than to post the sucker and move on to thinking about the next week. I would love to figure out a way to detach from the story a bit so I could lend a good editorial eye to it before I publish it. Maybe as I go further along I’ll get better at that, but I’d love any suggestions you might have on that point.

For this week, my dear friend sh has given me an assignment (which I asked for) – to start a story with a specific sentence and keep it to 500 words or less. So that’s where I’ll be headed this week. See you again in a few days.