The good, the bad, and the oops

Well, I’ve been at the hotel for my wife’s photography convention since Sunday and I’ve done some writing.  (This qualifies as good.)  I started to look through some unfinished work to see if there was anything I could modify or fix up to submit to the Clarions.  I found a few novel chapters that I had abandoned because it was so tough to write.

The novel was very slow-going because it was a comedy in the vein of Douglas Adams: lots of farsical situations and overblown hyperbole and just ridiculous science.  That’s hard to write, especially at the rate that the jokes were flying the first few pages (jokes, not necessarily laughs).  Well, I decided to try to turn that into a short story.  Hey, I was having trouble transitioning anyway, so why not?

Now the first draft of that story is complete (good!), half of it spliced together from pieces of a few false starts, the other half fresh writing.  And the  count on this draft is…6600 words/35 pages.  Oops.  I was aiming for 6000/30.

I think I can go back and cut and/or shorten some sections (good), but possibly at the cost of some of the jokes (that’s bad–all the story’s got going for it is the jokes).  I won’t be subbing it anyplace until I get some commentary from OWW or even Baen’s Bar (I hear they’re still operating for critiques) as my sense of humor is not reknowned for being universally appreciated.  If this stuff isn’t funny, I’ve wasted my whole writing spree (bad!!!).

I need to let it sit a few days before trying to edit.  I’ll poke my nose back in some other work tonight, maybe try paring down ***** some more for Clarion.  And who knows what else is hiding on this hard drive, waiting to become a 6000-word or less story?