Toodling Along

Still writing "The Flight of the Lark." I'm using it to improve my dialogue skills, and to practice weeding out those taglines that the editor at L&L Dreamspell detests so much. Basically, removing a lot of the "he saids" out of the dialogue, and setting it up so the position and content of the dialogue will identify the speaker as much as possible. That seems to be working well, so far.

I'm also paying a little more attention to conflict in this story. Usually, the conflict in my stories is fairly straightforward . . . man vs the spooky thing I throw at him. This time I'm trying to be little more nuanced than that. I'm also trying to have different conflicts going on on different levels. There's man vs nature obviously, primarily the crew of a riverboat trying to survive a hurricane. There's man vs man on a slightly more subtle level, with different characters playing off each other. Even man vs himself in several charactors.

So this story is actually proving worthwhile. Even if for the experience alone. Still don't have any other ideas anyways.