Slight change in plan.  I just realized that I have to get my Fairwood Writers submission polished AND get my last, final, totally-not-doing-this-again-after-this, submission for Clarion West ready.  Both of them being due in early December.

Cue heavy breathing.

So, I'll be working on short stories as I'm not sending off a rough draft of Smooth Vengeance, no matter how much I like the opening scene. I hope to write and polish three very good short stories for submission by the deadline.  That means less goofing off, to put it mildly.

I will be writing each Saturday with the Wordslingers. I'm really looking forward to that, but I'm not going for speed. I want to write as well as I can. Believe it or not, I don't always do that. Often, I try to write stories that just entertain me but for these submissions, I want to really impress people. So less sex and violence and more attention to sentence structure, tone and voice.

In that vein, I just wrote 1353 words of what's intended to be a short story.  The problem with that is, I just wrote 1353 words and I'm just now getting to the scene where the detective hears about the kidnapping case.  Rabble.  I need to get out of novel mode and into short story mode.  

I'll keep writing and keep you all posted.  Thanks.

A good day for escapism. I predict a lot of writing and reading in my future.

I'm getting started by re-reading the 42k words I did in March for Smooth Vengeance.  So far...it's not bad.  I've read worse, the action at the beginning works well, good characters.  I'm trimming a bit while I read but not really editing so far.  Once I'm done, I'll pick up where I left off with an eye towards powering in towards the ending.

It's interesting reading old work, it's almost like reading the work of a stranger. The odd thing about this book is how it started out with a strong, almost Noir voice but diverted into a more traditional 3rd person voice as it went on.  I'll need to fix that in my second draft.

For now, 1k new words written, about three pages.