This morning I woke up and decided to not turn on the internet, and instead wanted to do a rewrite of Grace. It went surprisingly well. I didn't cut much, maybe two hundred words in all. On the other hand I added in about eight hundred or so to bring us to a total of 4100. Pretty good for a short story. Okay, for my short stories. When I started this thing I swear I couldn't write a story less than 8000 words. And that was the first draft. As you know, Bob, I'm an adder in not a taker outer for my second drafts. (and yes, I wanted to rewrite that line to remove the snake reference, but decided it works better that way)
Some of those eight hundred words included this line. "The thing that weighed him down as a stone holds unwanted kittens under water." I must have deleted and retyped that line a dozen times as the gremlins and internal editor argued with my writer self. Is it too cruel? Will people think I'm a monster? Does it just not work right?
And then, after much debate, my writer self pulled out the best argument. I am, after all, the writer who wrote a ghost story about the death of an infant. And that story visibly upset some of my first readers (not so much from the horror in the story, there is relatively little, but from the subject matter).
So the line stays in. It clearly defines the relationship Avram (the protag and POV, third person omni) has with the Relic (the antagonist, well, one of the entities in it is). Or at least his perception of that relationship at that moment.
Grace is now up on the bulletin board of the writers group for critique next week. And now on to submissions and maybe getting some of my Steampunk Cthulhu story out.
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