Clash Resolved

You may remember at the beginning of the year I put out a list of resolutions, one of which was to blog at least once a week, well I messed up.  I didn’t blog last week.  The reason was one of my other resolutions, to enter at least one competition per month. 

Week before last I got a notice of an anthology being put together for Science Fiction writing.  Okay so an anthology isn’t exactly a competition, but you are in competition with every other writer who puts in for it.    And the subject really interested me.  It was about how science will change the human body, and I instantly knew what I wanted to write about. 

The idea was so clear in my head that I just had to get it down on paper, well okay, various bits on the computer, because I did type this one straight in.   So last weekend instead of blogging I basically sat down a wrote a whole 5000 word story in a single day.  To be honest I think I wrote about 6500 words, because there was one big section that I wrote and then just cut the whole scene out, covering it with a few lines in flashback instead.  When I was done I was still at 5700 words, so Sunday was spent trying to rewrite to get down to the 5000 words.  But I did it.  Took a lot of head scratching, but eventually I got the count down. 

Jon read it for me, pointed out a couple of mistakes and hated one idea, but it is science fiction after all and I needed that particular idea to ensure the final section worked the way I wanted it to, so I left it in hoping that the editors of the anthology aren’t so against the idea as my husband was. 

I also sent off another competition entry to Writing Magazine last week, so I worked on that a bit too.  Both stories have now been put forward so fingers crossed I hear good news from at least one of them. 

Also put a piece for work through to the prose group for criticism, things with this particular story is that it has a sub title, which I didn’t supply to the group, and there are two words in the prose which appear to be spelt wrong, but if you know the subtitle, you know those words are spelt the way they are.  Wonder if any one picks up on it.  I’ll let you know.