Thursday, November 11, 2010

Finishing touches

I'm just putting the last spit-and-polish to a new story for that crime/noir anthology I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Mind you, when I say 'new' I'm taking liberties, really. I first started the story so long ago it's buried in the mists of time, and I'd never finished it because I got hopelessly bogged down.

On re-reading I realised that I'd been trying to make it too long, and cram too much in, with the result that it lost focus and tailed off into pages of waffle and pointless dialogue with far too little action. There was a story in there somewhere if I hooked it out, though, so I cut away a lot of the later portion of the story, which wasn't very good, and added a whole new ending with what I hope is an entertaining twist.

I'm much happier with the result, which is about the same length but now actually *goes* somewhere, and it just shows that nothing you write is ever wasted, however awful it might seem at the time.

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