It’s Friday, and despite a fusillade of rejection letters earlier in the week, I’m feeling rather good because I finished the first draft of a new story yesterday. It’s short, for me at least, and it’s not stunningly original because it’s a pastiche of a classic but unknown fantasy author. It’s also at this point destined for a private publishing venture instead of the usual markets.

The neat thing that I realized after finishing it was how liberating all of those constraints ended up being. I didn’t need to outline because I followed the structure of the story I was satirizing. I didn’t need to worldbuild a society because the story moved quickly through only a few locales. The antiquated narrative voice perfectly fit the more pompous and baroque side of my own. I usually stretch the literal connotations of language, which many readers aren’t spry enough to follow. For this story I embraced that whole-hog, even to the point of inventing new words. And because the story won’t go through traditional submission channels, I had no nagging worry that some editor would get snarky at my poetics.

My first-reader thought the story came out very well. I’ll get another critique or two, then see where it stands. But at that point, I’m quite curious to see if this completely off-the-cuff effort might actually seize an editor’s interest. That would be hilarious, and quite a comment on this less restrained process. Who knows–stranger things have happened….

Tags: writing

This entry was posted on Friday, November 30th, 2007 at 8:58 am and is filed under random rants, writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.