Finding your own mistakes

One of the strengths here seems to be the continued exposure to your own flaws. Trust me, the fourth time you see someone else do a bad job at something you use, you start paying attention to how you're doing it even more so than usual. I see flaws in my writing that I didn't see before. I see places I need to work on, and areas that I still freaking am not paying attention to, though I mean to. I'm not cutting anything from this story though. Every time I think I know what the story doesn't need, I'm totally wrong. So they can just have it all, and tell me what I should take out. And I'm going to go back through and put in some scents, as the main character is blind: I've got the touch and hearing details well enough developed, I think.

I'll tell you one thing not to do when you're feeling depressed about the suckiness of your prose. Don't go wander through the Clarion Alumni page. And in particular, don't stop at Cory Doctorow's page. You will then decide to throw yourself from the balcony. Luckily Rudi's door was open, so he nicely chatted with me for a while, and we looked over the quote list for the t-shirt, and giggled at some of them (alas, all the seal sex ones have been removed, but there will be a seal on the front of the shirt at least.), and I ended up feeling much better.

1500 words

Today's new record is 1500 words. My story is still not quite finished, but I'm getting closer. I have faith in it. I'm up to 4220 (from 2800 yesterday, and 1700 the day before that.) It will be longer than I want it to be, I know, but like I said, I'm not cutting things. Other people can tell me where I messed up and tangented. I'm clearly not to be trusted as far as editing my stories goes. I'm hoping to keep it under 6000 words, but I'll have to see how that works out. Not too long at least, I hope, though Brendan and I think everyone should get to have at least one 7500 word story.