Writing that is not pro!fic
The Christmas rush is well behind us now - and the rush caused me to be amiss yet again, in updating this blog - but now the Christmas celebrating starts for us old school Catholics. My hours at the day job have gotten shaved down, due to the college kids being home for the holidays: this bothers me a bit since my paycheck has gotten smaller relative to how it looked in recent weeks, but this leaves me time to work on some fiction works in progress. Just finished a "Respectable Horror Story" for an anthology, and the deadline is coming upon us, so I've burned some of the proverbial midnight oil hammering it out. Rough draft I jotted across a bound journal and a pad I keep in my work smock, while as a second draft, I typed up those and bashed them into something more closely resembling a finished narrative. And the rough draft fell slightly short of the minimum word requirement. I managed to flesh it out more, then let it sit for a few hours before I started running the first rounds of line edits. Very tedious stuff, tightening sentences, replacing words that didn't work, cutting dialogue that didn't make sense. I'm liking the story intensely, but I need to make it more than what it is.
First snow of the day today, at long last: with the warm weather we had at Christmas, I yearned for it. It barely felt like Christmas, but now that we've come to the fifth day of Christmas, it feels and looks like an archetypal New England Christmas.
More Christmas thoughts to come in another entry, I needed to write about something not fiction, but the night has turned toward the wee hours of the morning, and I need my rest. More edits tomorrow, in between errands, and then sending off the story to the editor. Wish me luck, dear readers, I will need it in abundance.