Writing
With the help of Craing, I finally got my first short story polished. “The Hack” is a dark future, cyberpunk story with a great twist of irony at the end. I’m going to submit it to the Colorado Springs Fiction Writers’ Group when I’m finally a full-fledged member. I would submit a longer work (“The Hack” is a little over 2900 words,) but I don’t want to inflict my writing on someone else (or even a group of someone elses) if my writing is horrible.
I don’t know if my writing is good, bad, ugly, great, wonderful, or just plain average. I think that I’m a decent writer, but I’m not sure about it. I have a good grasp on grammar, spelling, flow of words, and the other technical details. It’s the creative side that I’m worried about.
I’ve already submitted “The Hack” to a publication, and they rejected it. I don’t blame them. The first draft wasn’t all that great. It flowed well, but had no point or real story line to it. Now that I’ve rewritten the ending (about a dozen times,) I hope that the story is good enough for the world at large to read it. I guess I’ll find out in a few months if its worthwhile.
The other project that I have going is a short story called “Tablet of Life” that really wasn’t all that good. I was trying to cram too much into 7,000 words, and I failed miserably. It’s 8,700 words, which is a little too long for a short story, and the descriptions that I have are lacking in detail. I assume that this is because I tried to be terse enough to fit it all in under 7,000 words. I’ve given up on “Table of Life” being a short story, but I’ve not abandoned the story. I’ve already chopped what I’ve written into 4 chapters. I’m going to go back through the chapters and add more detail to my descriptions. It will make it a better work of art, and will be the first novel that I’ve truly put effort into.
When I was younger (junior high and high school) I would read a great book, and that would inspire me to write. However, the writing was obviously a rip-off of what I had just read. I would get a few thousand words into my writing, and I would realize that I was just copy-catting what I had already read. I would scrap the writing for fear that someone would accuse me of stealing ideas.
Now that I’m older, I think I have the maturity necessary to write some well written works. We’ll see how it goes…
