Weight (flash fiction, about 650 words)

This little piece was something I tried for the same writing forum flash fiction contest a month after "A Hell of an Anticlimax." You can see that I tried a lot harder to keep the plot and action simple and minimal, to give myself more space for what I thought was really important.

Weight

The streaks hanging across the dyed-pink, sunset sky were grim proof of the situation. They stood out in sharp contrast to the gently rolling fields that splayed out in all directions from the base.

An Unexpected Side-Effect of Editing

Image courtesy Patrick Fore, via Unsplash

Editing a novel is an extremely time-consuming process, I'm learning. I guess I could go faster, but I feel like if I did, I would miss things and be in too much of a hurry.

I've been tracking the word count of the novel through each step of the editing process, and I thought it would be worth making a little point about the length of written works.

Don't worry too much if things seem a bit short on your first draft. As you read through and redraft, you'll find places to add material--character reactions, atmospheric details, etc.

A Hell of an Anticlimax (about 650 words)

Image courtesy Peter Herrmann, via Unsplash

 I wrote this for a flash fiction contest in the middle of last year, and never posted it anywhere else. Unfortunately, that contest had a maximum of 650 words, I think? And my first draft came out at nearly three times that. So, this little piece is a good example of what happens when you try to bite off more than you can chew, and also what happens when you try to gut a too-long story to meet an arbitrary length limit.

I remember quite vividly the moment that I accidentally saved over my first draft at around 1800 words after cutting about half of the story.

I present this to you as a bit of a cautionary tale...

A Hell of an Anticlimax

My friend Sam flips houses, and he always drags me along. Last year, it was a little cottage by a river. Today, a stately mansion behind a rusty iron fence.

“You've got to see inside!” he said, leaping out of the car. It was three stories of filthy brick. The windows were crusty gray. Inside, the floors were damaged hardwood. The walls were discolored and peeling. I could see pipes through holes, and nasty water stains.

“It's a... fixer-upper,” was all I could muster.

“It has potential!” He practically sang it.

Potential energy maybe. To fall on us.

A New(-ish) way to Plug

Yeah Good Idea Butt-head GIFfrom Yeah Good Idea GIFs

I've been reading a bit recently about marketing and all that jazz, and I came up with an idea that I'm sure has been done before, but I hadn't thought to try myself until just last weekend.

Yes, I'm still editing the novel, but bear with me:

"Four large Dornier aëroplanes..."

Photo by Clemens Vasters from Viersen, Germany, Germany, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 Just a little fun thing: I'm re-reading Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness because (I think) Justin and I are going to talk about it on our next episode of The Wordy Pair.

I guess I haven't mentioned our little podcast on this blog yet, have I? Oh well, there it is! It's funny and goofy and we talk a lot about writing and great stories.

Anyway, right at the beginning of Lovecraft's story, he mentions the airplanes they use in the story with the words that make up the title of this post.

Editing my first novel...

Just a little bit of me editing like a goober.

 

Well, phew. About a week ago I finished the rough draft of what (I think) will be the last chapter of my first novel.

I'm writing a longer story about the Misevelin Salvage crew, an adventure where they are trying to get to the bottom of a very strange event that has everyone worried: the appearance of an empty lifeboat near the orbit of Markledge (the planet where Aric & co. are based).

Cracks in the Walls at the Bottom (about 4300 words)

Image Prompt "The Pit," from Iron Age Media

I got a little too enthusiastic about this prompt and ended up plotting a three-part story that might end up at novella length.
However, the different parts are fairly self-contained, so here's a slightly reworked version of part of the second act, which works as its own action-packed short story. Enjoy!

Warrenton was the first vertical city on Sophra, a planet that had a clean oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, but one too thin at the surface for humans to breathe unassisted. The Vertical City Project was designed to take advantage of the cool, stable crust of the planet and create a haven for humanity deep below the surface. Ten kilometers below the surface, the air was thin but sufficient. Fifteen down, oxygen partial pressures were comparable to Earth at sea level. At twenty, the air was thicker and made physically demanding jobs, like mining, easier and more efficient.

The massive excavation project had just crossed the twenty kilometer mark a few weeks ago. The main shaft was about half a kilometer wide and ample ventilation and modern lighting technology made the deep underground just as healthy as a day in the sun on Earth.

However, today there was a problem. One of the three main ventilators failed, and the other two shut down only a few minutes later. The elevators stopped working, and the network of radio frequency repeaters that made communication possible through and around the caverns went down. The city managers scrambled to get things back online. Without ventilation, the air down at the bottom of the city would be breathable for around three hours. Citizens living deep underground all maintained twelve hour supplies of breathable air, but the clock was ticking.