September Fruit

Now Playing: SHERLOCK HOLMES by Hans Zimmer
Just Read: PACKING FOR MARS by Mary Roach--A fun read! Lots of good science but also very funny. I love hearing the ridiculous stories of serious astronauts!
Reading Now: SPIN by Robert Charles Wilson

It's been a busy but fruitful September. In school we had some tough respiratory tests, then went to Seattle for a national conference and a student election, which I won! I'm the National Student Representative to the AANA Education Committee, and my first duties took me to Chicago for a weekend conference of committees. So needless to say, not a whole lot of writing time.

But, knowing everything that was coming, I spent Labor Day weekend writing a behemoth of a story--a 14,000-word old-school fantasy--that I edited here and there (literally, in Seattle and Chicago and at home in North Carolina) until I had a pretty decent final draft of 50 Microsoft Word pages. I just submitted it to Writers of the Future, right at the end of this quarter.

It's got some aspects that I think appeal to the WotF judges, but it's originality is questionable. It sounds like it wants to be a Game of Thrones style sword-and-sorcery type of tale, which is great, but I'm wondering if the judges will frown on it for being cliche. We'll see!

One thing I've been trying to do lately is edit my own stories better, to be a bit harder on myself and read them more honestly. I think the past two or three stories I've written have benefited. It helps me to print them out and let them sit for a week or so, then come at them with a pen and tear them up. Also, my wonderful wife got me some awesome moleskin notebooks for story planning, and they've been helping. So for October's story, I'm gonna try something a little less run-of-the-mill. Here goes!