This evening, or rather, this morning, I completed another first draft of a story. Yahoo! And it’s only about 5000 words! Double-yahoo!
I mentioned it earlier on this blog, the one about the foreign NGO development worker youth in post-war Colorado, jaunting around the countryside on a stupid wager and getting an experience neither of them bargained for. The story in fact ended up integrating something from a piece of tech that I explored in a very different story that I wasn’t 100% happy with, even in revision, “Upgraded Phrase List for Mil-Spec iTrans Phrase Translation Unit, Version 5.2.07”. (I’m still considering maybe submitting somewhere, though I’m a touch less enthusiastic about that story now that I’ve worked some of the material into a story with, you know, characters, and a plot, and so on. Maybe I’ll send it to Adbusters and see if they’re interested, since it’s a mostly-different audience and the style of the piece might appeal to them…)
“The Wager” is still a rough first draft, so it’s a bit grubby, a bit unsubtle in points, a touch preachy in others… so I think it shall have to sit and solidify a little, first, before I pass it to my crit group or other people I’ll be approaching for feedback. Which is fine, I sent a different story there just the other day, so it’s not like I could send this one on too.
However, I am happy at having pulled the story off, a first draft anyway. It’s still in 2nd person, though I’m not sure 1st wouldn’t be better — I’m just not sure anymore, is all. I’d like to make 2nd person work, but we’ll have to see how I feel once I have some distance from the story.