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Ogallala Rewrite

Inspired by Alfred Bester’s example, I’m going to worry less about exactly how the science works in the rewrite of this story. This will infuriate some readers, maybe — though I think it can be balanced if I work things just right. In the original draft, the science was actually quite faulty according to the dominant model we have now about icecaps melting, and the implications of the melt were totally misconstructed by one character, though not by accident. I think I can still work in some of that, but actually, I think I can do a better job of bringing across how and why it’s important that the science is indeed flawed… while, still, mostly, focusing on what is actually important, which is all about the characters, the countries they come from, and the world they live in.

I managed to boil something like 1500 words of opening–the first two scenes–into a mere 750 850 words that far more strongly set up the main character, plays much less beat-around-the-bush about a weird artifact encountered by the POV character’s group, and also conveys a lot of the information that I much more slowly decanted in the original draft.

I’m hoping to get this done in the next couple of weeks, in time to send in for the next Tesseracts. Once this story’s done, Crystal Methuselah is next, I think. Jjangguk’s going to be a big job, so I may save it for a longer stretch of free time, such as the end of December and beginning of January, before I “jaunte” (hee) over to China briefly for some writing research…

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