:)

Lessons, oh, those wonderful lessons of life and writing.

A local art studio specializing in computer and animation design put out a call for short “monster” stories for a show happening in the Summer — they’ve had to extend the deadline twice, because they haven’t received many workable entries (and they only need 10 tales!). I only found out about it because they’d posted flyers in my local Funky Coffee Shop Hangout.

So I sent two tales in, a new off-the-cuff tale of about 500 words that was written in a fit of caffeine-insanity…and The Faery Doom Brigade, rewritten to fit the current non-fanfic state of the tales and MASSIVELY cut down.

Remember — 2k word limit. The original tale posted is about 5800 words.

Talk about an EDUCATION. How to tell a story, in as few words as possible. Cramming in as much detail and character as I could, and keeping the essential flavor of Barb’s & my ideas. Faery Doom Brigade attacking Ren Faire, in. Sid, in. Everything else became extremely negotiable. Every time I hit a limit, every time I thought “there’s no way I can cut this down any further”, I’d go away for a bit, come back, and take another 200 words out.

It took four days of intense re-working, but I did it. The cut-down version tops off at 1800 words.

Now I wait.

More updates as I have them. 🙂