Booya!!! They're Done!!

This morning I finished the rough draft of "Legacy of Flies", the eighth and final ghost story needed for my Shades anthology. It weighs in at 12, 631 words, a novelette like most of the other stories in the collection. These eight stories should result in a decent sized book that has about seventy thousand words once finished. (edit; a quick word count obtained by adding the different manuscripts reveals a count of 69,457. That could change as time goes on.) I still need to write an introduction, but that's only a few paragraphs and doesn't really count. The point is I now have all eight ghost stories I needed to make this anthology what I wanted it to be.

The stories are... (in no particular order)

Storm Chase,
A Memory of Me,
Death and White Satin,
An Echo of Blood and Mirrors,
Legacy of Flies,
A Singularity of Purpose,
Dance of the Ancients,
and
A Long, Cold Forever of a Night.

All exist in different stages of refinement, but all are written. Yet a lot of work remains.

Now begins the editing. I intend to go through the tales, story by story, and edit each one with a highly critical eye. I will need to review the stories for flow, and also figure out the order in which they should appear in the anthology. I pretty much want "A Long, Cold Forever of a Night" to be the last one, but other than that the order is open to whatever works best.

Then, once I have the introduction written and the stories edited, arranged in order, and all put together in one manuscript, I'll need to decide how I will format it for publication. Do I attempt to format it for the kindle myself? I've done a couple of single short stories, but this would be a much bigger project and I also want a couple of bells and whistles like a clickable table of contents...things that are currently beyond my skills. I will also have to decide if I want to go through Createspace and make a physical copy of the book. I would kind of like one of those...which means I'll have a lot more to learn.

So that's where things are now. An important milestone has been reached, but I still have a long way to go.

But the adventure is in the journey :)

Climactic Pauses

I think I've started to notice that part of my struggles with writing come from something I'm now going to call "the climactic struggle". It seems that the nearer and nearer to the climax of a story I get, the slower and slower I write.

I'm currently working on the last story of the Shades anthology, and I'm now at the point where the protagonist struggles to survive her encounter with the above pictured menace. And I'm now at the point where I'm literally writing "sentence by sentence". Every sentence, every word, is being measured and weighed...and often deleted and restarted. Last night, I worked for four hours to complete just one double spaced page of writing.

I think it's because of the emotion of the situation. The climax is the emotional highpoint of the story, and that's where I start getting very cautious.and critical...maybe overmuch. But if a story is going to work, the emotion desired has to be achieved. Whether it's fear, joy, sadness, or laughter...the story has to deliver.or both the reader and the writer have wasted their time.

Come to think of it, the climax is kind of like the package that the hook promises to deliver. You use a hook to draw your reader into the story, and the climax is the highpoint that convinces the reader that a further relationship with the writer is worthwhile....

...hmmm.

Okay, I'm heading into metaphors I think I'll just leave alone.

Anyways, hopefully sometime this coming week I'll be announcing that the rough draft of Legacy of Flies is finished and I'll have be ready to write my introduction and move on the the next phase.

Go me :)