Three Points for Hanging in There

Dang, am I glad I didn't give up on that short story. Did around 1200 words of it today after going over and editing what I did yesterday and I really like this little story now. It's taking off. Note to self: Never decide a story's fate after a bad day.

And the stuff I did yesterday isn't nearly as horrible as I thought. Why does the mind play tricks like that? How can something I wrote thinking the whole time I wrote it that it was terrible turn out to be pretty good stuff? I am mystified. Not only that, the material I thought was a major digression and would end up making this story go on forever ended up tying in perfectly with the following scene and now it looks like this piece will remain a short story.

Reading News: Started reading Holly Lisle's Memory of Fire last night. Wow. That sucker moves. Likable characters, lots of action. I have a feeling I'll be raving about this one. Oh, um, does this already qualify?

I love good books.

Revison

Since my revision attempts at the novel crashed, I picked up an old first draft of a short story (a 54 page "short" story) to try to practice my revising muscles on. I ended up with a pretty nice second draft that I let Beth read. She pegged the things that were wrong with it (things about character motivation that I'd suspected all along). But after some initial frustration, we also discussed what was right with the story. And now I'm seeing ways of making a third draft that could work really well--not to mention bringing the thing down to a reasonable size; the second draft was still 39 pages long. So all is not lost. There are things I like very much about this story. It's worth trying to save.