Thank you, Auntie Björk — Solvjaynghi’s Finally Ready To Be Sent On His Way

Got revisions done, finally, on one more brutal little piece, “Solvjaynghi’s Christmas Wish.” It’s now very slim, very muscular, and very bloody at ~4800 words, and that’s the absolute lower limit for that story, so I’m accepting it and moving on. I thank Auntie Björk because I was listening to a few mixes of “Army of Me” on a loop as I worked on it. The best one for battles involving staple guns, filthy trolls, and a screwdriver in the brain is the mix featuring Skunk Anansie. But this story took a lot of work to get done. Just tidying, trimming, and adding missing details resulted in a loss of only 200 words, but it took me what felt like all day. Ah well. That’s how it is sometimes.

I’m waiting to hear back about a query I sent off, something I might do up in the next couple of days, but for now, I think the next thing up is to read (with red pen) a printout of my Clarion West story from week 3, “Winter Wheat.” My goal for this rewrite?

Less with the quiet desperation; more with the flaming tractors and ‘splosions. Plus two supporting characters that need to be morphed into one stronger and more interesting one, which should be pretty easy, actually. We’ll see how all that works.

(I’ve got a big stack of stories by my desk, printed out, awaiting editing or detailed notes for rewrites. Some of them actually almost a decade old, with concepts too cool to abandon to the trunk, but that means some rewriting awaits me.)

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