After finishing up the rough draft of my first story, “Killing the Immortals,” a few weeks ago, I needed to kill some time while I got a bit of space from it. If you can help it, you never want to edit something you just wrote. It’s hard to catch all your stupid mistakes when you’re that close to it.
But I didn’t want to just sit here watching Netflix while it collected a bit of dust. So I immediately dove into writing a shorter piece that I could put in my bank for doing something with later. The working title for it is “Tomorrow’s News Today,” and it’s about a journalist who accidentally discovers that anything he writes will happen exactly as he wrote it. If someone compared it to a Twilight Zone episode, I’d be pretty damn pleased. Hell, let’s be honest, I’ll be happy if anyone is just willing to read it, especially if they pay to do so. But I’d definitely love to have people see a little Rod Serling there.
What I’ll do with it, I’m not quite sure. There are a few options: 1) Release it as a stand-alone work, probably charging $1.99 or $2.99 as a regular list price; 2) Keep writing these shorter pieces and package 4-5 of them into a collection that I release as a novel-length book that sells for $4.99 or so; 3) Keep it in my back pocket for potential entry into a contest or submission to go into an anthology when a publisher is looking for stories; 4) Give it away for free on my site, potentially for people to sign up for an email list I’ll be building soon. And, keep in mind, these aren’t mutually exclusive. I could, over time, do all four if I choose.
In the meantime, here’s a little tease to the story. Below, you can read the first few paragraphs of the rough draft, so you can get a look at the beginning, and the mood of the story: [Read more…] about My Next Short(er) Story