Ogallala Finished

Well, except the basic proofread that it’ll need before I send it out. It’s another novelette, at 9,350 words. I was hoping to make the story a shorter one, but of course, big ideas and big characters demand a big story, I guess. I’ll have to work something else up, though, for Tesseracts. Right now, I’m looking at “Realer” and “The Wager” as the next best possilibities (since I think “Professor Whitney’s Resignation” will take too long to work up, and “The Crystal Methuselah” might be too edgy for this market), but each story is going to take at least two or three days of sustained work, and right now, I have too much grading to devote to that. So I think I’ll focus on doing readthrough-and-edits on them during my breaks from essay-marking.

This story is one I owe a lot to my crit group, which is my Clarion West classmates online, for helping me with. Three people especially provided me with useful criticisms that heavily influenced my reworking of this story: one, to make sure the science, if not credible, was at least clearly not couched for by the universe in which the story takes place; one, for feedback about what was missing in my two main characters; and one, for advising me to kill off my protagonist’s family drama. I didn’t fully the latter advice, but a serious amputation did occur.

Anyway, it’s nice to have another project done, and practically ready to send out somewhere.

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