Thursday Work-in-Progress: Starting a New Short Story
It has taken me a couple of months, but I think that I’m finally ready to reframe these Thursday blog posts. Instead of sharing tidbits from the post-publication phase of my story collection, Quiet Americans, I’m going to focus on new work-in-progress: fiction, poetry, book reviews, essays, and freelance assignments. Assignments, drafts, revisions, submissions, applications, and so forth. The possibilities are, as they say, limitless.
I’m still home on medical leave this week, but I’ve had somewhat more energy, and I have been able to spend some decent chunks of time reading text longer than a magazine article and writing text longer than a tweet. My main accomplishment is a completed first draft of a new short story.
This isn’t just any short story. This is my first commissioned short story, and the commission seems to have resulted from the “commissioner” having read Quiet Americans. I don’t want to say too much about the project, because I am superstitious. Until the story is out there for you to enjoy, I don’t want to give too many details.
But I will say something about the process of writing this draft. (more…)