Sometimes, the story sticks its toe in the dirt and tells you it’s not going to go where you want it to go. Most often, the story is right. It knows better than you do. Listen to it. It’s telling you this for your own good. It knows itself better than you do.

Now the backstory. Pay attention.

Months ago, I contracted to contribute a story to Michael Jan Friedman’s shared-world PANGAEA anthology. The story dropped dead at 2000 words and went moribund on me. If you had asked me on Monday whether it would ever be finished, I would have said no. But the deadline was knocking on my door and on Tuesday I elected to give it another shot. The story remained moribund. Again, it didn’t look like it was going to happen. I was about to throw up my hands, even if that would have cheated a fan who paid a hundred dollars to have his name applied to one of the characters.

Then it suddenly occurred to me that the tragedy I had outlined was the problem; I simply had no faith in it. It was an exercise in futility, that would take thousands of words to clumsily steer in a direction that would get less and less interesting the nearer I approached a downbeat conclusion. What ELSE could happen?

2500 words a day, last two days, the last two of them being THE END.

“A Dearth of Dragons,” which may not be the final title, is 7K, just short of novelette length, though it may pick up another five hundred (or lose that many) during tomorrow’s polish.

Only in the first act does it resemble the story it started out to be. Then better stuff happens.

This is always a surprise to the writer; a welcome surprise.

Also, in case it’s not clear by now:  I write some awfully formidable women.

Tags: A Dearth of Dragons, Pangaea, writing | Category Books, Commentary, Science Fiction