Today I am wearing my carpenter pants. Damn. You carpenters wear some comfy pants. These are the type of pants you should wear on Monday. Comfy pants. If I had my way I’d wear pajamas to work on Monday.

Anyway, it was a conquer-the-known-universe weekend and I succeeded. I managed to finish off the short piece I was working on and get it sent to the editor. Officially, it’s no longer a flash fiction story. I got some positive feedback, and word that something more substantial would head my way Tuesday.

I managed to write three scenes toward the new version of my short story Strange Loop. So far this version is much better than the original. In fact, this version has allowed me to make two really important discoveries about my own writing*. That’s always a huge bonus. I’m hoping to finish it up either tonight or tomorrow night, give it a few rewrite, grammar, and prose corrections and then send it off to my Clarion writing group.

I’ve almost finished reading a novel I’m critting for a fellow Clarionite. I should get that finished tonight, and then I can start the actual critique. That will be done before I start my mini weekend vacation. I’m off work Friday and then off next Monday. That means four days to focus on the novel. Yep, I’m still working on my novel and will be for most of the next year.

Faireuza hit 71 late Friday night. I’m limiting my World of Warcraft time to Friday nights now. It’s just too easy to get wrapped up in that game and lose sight of all other forms of existence. However, if I can hit a level every two weeks, I should be raiding on a B-team at some point this summer. That works for me. I had a fun PVP experience with an Orc warrior though. There’s nothing like being a hunter and just mercilessly beating down a warrior. That’s love.

* Here are the two things I discovered:

1) Character and problem are two things you can build strongly on in a shorter work. See, I’ve been trying and trying to figure out how to write short and this was one of the things that kept evading me; the whole concept that the problem needed to be something complex.

Well, it doesn’t. In fact, it’s sometimes better just to keep it as something rather simple. In this particular story though, this problem is represented in a few different characters. There is a mythical representation of it, a real world physical representation of it, and then the actual problem inside the main character.

In my story, the character first faces the mythical version. It is a physical confrontation and she does walk away defeated—clueless still about what the problem is. She, for the most part, is ready to give up, but knows she still wants her goal. Next, she faces someone who she would have never made the choice to face on her own. This meeting is forced on her. However, this particular incarnation of the problem is a teacher or mentor representation of the problem (I would imagine that other archetypes can take on the personification of the problem). She must directly face the problem here and understand it. This is a sort of realization scene. She has a new weapon, now how do you apply it to the first version of the problem?

Once she understands the problem, then she can actually transform and make the solution to the problem, or the problem itself a part of her. In Strange Loop, she is transformed physically by the problem, but she also learns about a particular need she had that someone outside her saw, but she could not see herself. It’s a small thing, but in the scope of a small story, it’s a life changing thing. It makes her into a new person.

This new person can now go back to the mythical incarnation of the problem and use what she knows to fix it. She does, and this grants her access to her goal.

That’s something I’ve been trying to focus on. How do I make the problem that is keeping the main character from her story goal naturally derive from the main character? In other words, the fictional character is to some extent the problem, so how do we overcome self to overcome the problem?

2) Use more dialogue. I don’t know why, but I’ve always had an aversion to dialogue. Well, not necessarily and aversion, but I’ve been timid with my use of dialogue for fear of overuse. I think this comes from my early—really early, studies of screenwriting. One of the earliest things I read was to limit the talking heads, but I don’t think that qualifies so much for fiction.

This version of the story has a lot more dialogue than the last, and it’s much better because of it. I Think I can go back now and look at some of my other works and probably clarify a lot with dialogue. Not that it’s the new hammer, but it’s nice when you look through the toolbox and say, “Hey, this is a nifty widget. I should really be using this to do more.”

Which is another reason I should be critiquing more. I’m in the process of reading a work that is very heavy with dialogue. Long conversations. My first reaction was to go, “Ack, lots of dialogue, see where you can cut!” And to my surprise, it was all pretty necessary. Not only that, but it really worked well. In fact, I liked it. So what’s up with that? Again, early impressions I received as a young writer stuck with me and I never questioned it. So here’s a lesson to other young writers. Question everything you hear from your writer instructors. So far, there don’t seem to be as many Truths in writing as I originally assumed.

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