Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Yay for Editing!

No, it's not that I'm ecstatic about editing all of a sudden. After spending all of October editing a short story, "Worlds Apart," I had grown so sick of it that I never wanted to see it again. With the help of my trusted beta readers (@dreamrock and @spacecrazed on twitter) I had scoured every line, second guessed every word, and in such a flurry that I had also killed any confidence and joy I'd had in the piece. If it had been on paper instead of in the computer, I might have crumpled it up and thrown it away.

So, you know, at that point I figured it was done. And just in time, too, since the point of doing all that editing was to submit it to the Dead Robots' Society podcast's 3rd annual short story contest. The story had come out of a sort of prompt they had in one of their episodes, so when they announced the contest, it seemed appropriate to submit it there. For one thing, it was motivation to, er, edit it. ;)

And then... I won! This has got to be the first contest of any sort that I've won :O It's also the first short story that's gotten recognition anywhere. They are going to record the story and release it in their podcast feed. WOOT^3!

One last note on editing -- I completed NaNoWriMo (51k in 17 days) and kept a file for planned changes, but there's no way I'm launching into that right now, because of a bunch of holiday plans coming up. It felt surprisingly natural to write a 51k story even though I'm usually writing short stories and flash fiction. That was encouraging! I didn't even write from an outline, which I usually do. Go me!