holy skattertash!!! story finished?!

Holy skattertash!!!

You won't believe this ... even I don't ... but I've finally finished one complete f@cking short story. Well, curbing the excitement, I've finally finished the first draft of a short story -- with a beginning, a middle portion, and an ending.

And it's not one of the short stories that I've planned to write on previous attempts -- those I refer to remain works in various stages of progression -- this is a completely new story which I worked out in my mind last night while trying to lull myself to sleep and trying to take away my thoughts from the forthcoming company outing this weekend.

In between work engagements, I worked on the story. It was a brick-by-brick effort mind you as I needed the entire day to finish the 2,586-word draft.

This short story I've finished however is still going to be a work in progress. My delight in this is that at least it's already finished. Now, the process of editing and review kicks in. I'll first let my excitement die down lest it interfere with the editor in me, and then when the story has simmered for a week or so, I'll dig it up again and look at it from an editor's perspective and make my remarks with the aim of making it a better story.

I know I got my tenses mixed up in this one somewhere, somehow and that's going to be what I'll primarily be looking out for. I'll also look at how MS Word interprets the piece and wherever it marks the piece in green (a signal that something's wrong grammatically -- although unreliable at times especially where literary or poetic license needs to be invoked) I'll double and triple check.

It's a sci-fi piece, generally speaking. Churning through the sub-genres of SF, it's a mix of post-humanism and probably a bit post-apocalyptic as I mention nuclear war in it. And that is what makes this "achievement" even more unbelievable as I'm not so much of an SF fanatic but more of the Tolkienesque-style literati complete with your requisite dragon, dwarves and elves.

Unfortunately though, this didn't meet the deadline of the Dean Alfar anthology scheduled this year. It's late by a day ... one f@cking day. Like I said, the idea for the story germinated only last night, some 30 minutes or so before September 15 deadline ended. Now, whether this is the piece I send to the other writing contest I'm planning to join is still up for personal and internal debate. I do believe the other sci-fi pic that I've been working on still has some merit although the challenge with that is when to finish it.

Let's see in two weeks where we are with this fic-piece. But it feels great, really, really great!