Writing Report December 13, 2016

No significant progress on the female barbarian story, at least not in overall word count. I went back and made some changes in the first part of the story, realizing my location bore a certain passing resemblance to Petra, the fabled “rose red city half as old as time” and if I was going to have even a faint allusion to Petra, I might as well go all the way and that’s when I remembered Derinkuyu, which is an even more incredible underground city (and one of many!) in Turkey.

So I re-wrote some of the opening and now I’m exploiting the confined sense of those cities plus providing a very interesting stage for the final confrontation (setting it in an underground city gives me the ability to set up my climax more believably since one of the chief components of my heroine’s victory is now already part of the city).

I’m midway thru a crucial scene where my heroine and the one person she thought she could trust now realize just how little they really do trust one another. Another couple of thousand words to finish laying track, they I can get down to the wholesale slaughter that will climax the story.

I’m slightly under 19,000 words at this stage so once the remainder of my info drop is done and the climax written, I should be clocking in around 25,000 to 27,000 words.

We shall see, we shall see…

Last night as I was getting ready for bed I had an idea for a short story so I took a notebook I keep in the bedroom with the intent of jotting down the broad strokes then working on it later (much later, as in “after I finish the female barbarian story” later).

But before I wrote down the general idea, the opening sentence to the story struck me so I thought, well, write that down then the general idea but then the next paragraph presented itself and then the next and…

Bottom line, at about 3:40am I had a new short story written, “The Vulture,” clocking in at around 1,300 words.

I’m cleaning it up and kicking it out the front door tomorrow; I’ll sleep on it first.

© Buzz Dixon