Monday, 25 August 2003

I finally got some more fiction writing done again, sort of.

I'd written almost a whole story, oh, a year or two ago, when there was call for submissions for an anthology of bookstore stories. But almost as soon as it opened, word went out that the anthology was already full.

My nearly-done story was pretty flawed. With its intended market gone, I didn't see much urgency in trying to fix it. So I set it aside.

The biggest flaw was that the climax was in the wrong place (well, wrong places). Today, though, I figured out what the climactic point had to be, and I cut the story up and restructured it to put the climax in the right place. I think I've gotten that just about right.

There's still a lot to do. I need to go through and fix up the prose. (I write better now.) It's only 2500 words, but it's a small story so even that is a bit long. I need to tighten up some. Some of the seams where I stitched together the pieces still show, so I need to fix that. But it's a credible story now.

Not many new words, still a satisfying evening's work.

It's a fantasy piece. I don't write very many of those.

Chambana Speculations is planning to get together again in three weeks to read something by one of our other members. I'll be sure to get this polished up enough to post and we'll have two things to read for that meeting.

L. Blunt Jackson has a story up at 31 Eyes that I enjoyed. I tried to send him email telling him so, but the email address I had for him bounces. If you've got a current address for him, let him know that I enjoyed "Walking Among Old Hills."

I always enjoy his journal entries. Somehow the way he talks about his own personal experiences and aspirations illuminate for me my own experiences and aspirations.

I noticed a while ago that the vast majority of searches that find my site are people searching for "t-shirt quotes" or "runners quotes" and finding my page with the quotes that were the runners-up for the Clarion 2001 t-shirt .

Since that turns out to be a primary entry point to my site, I added a bit more text about how the page came to be and a few more links into the rest of my site. (And, since a lot of the people seem to be looking for stuff for runners, I added a link to one of my favorite runs.)

Speaking of running, I ran 4 miles today.

I'm not getting my short runs in as often as I'd like. I really ought to run 2.5 miles three times a week, in addition to a long run of 5 or 6 miles. Instead, though I seem to be replacing the short runs with longer, less frequent runs. But if I replace three 2.5-mile runs with two 3-mile runs, I've cut my weekly milage by more than 10%. If I replace them with two 4-mile runs, there's so little difference between short runs and long runs that it doesn't seem worth maintaining the pretense that there is a difference.