Brrr!

[desperance]

It's gratifyingly cold out there at last - a proper foggy, frosty winter's day that nips at your nose and ears and is instantly nostalgic (oh, my lost childhood - rime on the inside of the windows, yes, that we melted with misty breaths...).

My author copies of the new horror collection "Phobic" arrived unexpectedly this morning, with my story 'The Deadly Space Between' included. This is the fastest I've ever known a book move from offer to print; the same story, of course, is published today in our own "Phantoms at the Phil II". Stereo story...

Meanwhile, I spend the day sitting here hacking away at this year's story, 'The House of Mechanical Pain' - except that it's not really hacking, more like whittling. The story's way too long for a reading, but there aren't any significant swathes I can cut, no subplots or extraneous characters to pick out whole. It's all half a line here, half a line there: trimming out the richness, alas, killing my darlings. Like adapting a book to be read on the radio: there'll be nothing left but the plot. Gotta be done, but I don't like to do it.

One solution, of course, would be to write shorter stories. I know this, you don't need to tell me.

Comments

[szandara.livejournal.com]

Argle on the hack-and-trim. I did the inverse recently--cut a 6,000 word speech on professional ethics down into a newsletter article--well, it wound up being a series of three articles of roughly 1,200 words each. But it was a crazymaking exercise, trying not to leave out any of the important points and still get the word count down. Plus I had to make the shift from something meant to be spoken, to have a semi-conversational tone and elicit audience reaction at various points, to something that worked on the page.

So, I feel your pain.

Speaking as someone who reads reallyreallyfast, I have to say that longer stories are just fine by me. :-)