I watch the ripples change their size
But never leave the stream
Of warm impermanence
And so the days float through my eyes
But still the days seem the same
And these children that you spit on
As they try to change their worlds
Are immune to your consultations
They're quite aware of what they're goin' through

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Daddy's Little Girl in Rewrites

Yes, it's Labor Day. Yes, I'm working. It's a sickness.

I've started the rewrite of Daddy's Little Girl. Thanks to the comments from the writers group I belong to I'm adding a lot in. At one time I posted a comment on Camille's blog about how horror needs to find that psychological crack in our personas and bore right in there without flinching, and then keep at it. I forgot that with DLG. I'm back to it. Damn that's hard.

One of the comments from the group that's driving most of what I'm putting in was that I had turned what was probably one of the most terrible things to happen to a parent into a sick extended joke. My response was, yeah, I probably went to the light side to keep the reader from throwing the magazine against a wall. Well, I'm driving at least closer to that later sentiment now. And it hurts to write some of this. The death of a child, a marriage, a persona. But in there is a good horror story. I hope to pull it off.

The story is going to be longer at the end of this. It has to be, I have to show more, make the narrator less "emotionally flat." That was the major criticism that almost everybody echoed. Word count when I started 1587. I'm at the only scene break (about one third of the way through) and I'm up to 1905. Three hundred plus words of pain and dispair.

2 comments:

Serena said...

...horror needs to find that psychological crack in our personas and bore right in there without flinching, and then keep at it.

Yes! That's it exactly. Not that I write horror, but that's why I read it. Good luck with DLG.

Steve Buchheit said...

Thanks, Serena. Yeah, I forgot my own advice, and that made the story weaker. I have to remember to leave the flinching to the reader.