So I’m down in the basement today working away at this short story that’s due for a workshop by the end of Sunday. No problem. I’ve actually been fiddling with it for two days, and all is well. It’s a fine story. I am not disappointed in it.
Then, through a serendipitous event or three, I stumble upon a different thread. So I put this story away for a moment, and two hours later I find that I am transported into a totally different direction, and a totally different world, telling a totally different story for this exact same assignment.
This story is like crack to me now.
How much like crack, you ask? I’m now debating the value of staying up overnight to work on it. If I don’t, I worry that it will just keep me up, anyway. I hate the idea of throwing off my sleep cycle again now that I’ve finally gotten it back to something semi-routine, but we will see what happens.
I have no idea if I can pull this one off in a way that will actually be even semi-commercial or semi-successful (philosophical question of the day: is there a difference?). I have no idea if the thing will work or not. But it is suddenly just flat-out cool because it’s challenging. It’s like a little puzzle coming to me, due to the way I’ve stumbled upon it, in stages with twists and turns and new emotional tones and … well … it’s just fun.
As you might now tell, this is the story that I will submit. At least, I think it is. I “finished” it this afternoon in pseudo-code. It needs fleshing out at the end, and to be honest, it may need re-arranging. I really just wrote it verbatim as it came to me. It wanders a bit. That’s okay, because I love it for its wanderings right now. Tomorrow we’ll see if we can rope some of those wanderings in. Tomorrow we’ll see if it’s actually any good.
But it won’t really matter to me in the end (of course, I just lied, but we’re are a writer, we’ll ignore that fact for the moment). The mere work that happened this afternoon was worth it. The mere idea of the work. The mere attempt to create something. It was really what matters. And the irony in this is something that you, dear and poor Typosphere reader, will only get to experience if it is ever published. [grin]