Blathering On

So, Winter's Regret has been out for a few weeks now. Hopefully, you bought it, read it, and liked it. Hopefully, you liked my story, "An Unexpected Reunion." Being somewhat brain dead this week, I thought I'd share a little about how that story came about. I don't think there will be any great revelations here, but perhaps it will interest you. If not, have a nice weekend, and maybe I'll have a little more functionality next week.

Back in a time that's embarrassingly-long ago, an idea was born, an idea that grew into a manuscript I have mentioned here far too many times (hint: it's called PARALLEL LIVES). During the first two or three months I was drafting that novel, I was on fire. It seems new ideas and scenes were popping into my head constantly. It was almost like living with a movie or tape recorder inside my skull. Whatever else I was doing, the story was playing out, and when I had writing time, I was essentially transcribing what I had seen/heard/thought earlier.

At some point, the ideas dried up, but that was fine, because the story itself had run its course. And I did have a story (I should point out that a lot of these scenes just seemed to play out in my head independently of what had come before or what might come after; they were just ... scenes). But I also had too much. There were some scenes that were, functionally speaking, duplicates of other scenes. And some scenes that just didn't fit the way I thought they would when I first wrote them. Finally, there were some that I thought had to come out just because the thing was too long. "An Unexpected Reunion" fell into this category. I liked the chapter as it stood in the manuscript, but on further review, it wasn't essential. Out it came.

The tough part of turning that excerpt of a deleted chapter into a stand-alone short story was the fast that I still have plans on getting its parent published. So, I could have changed the names of the characters so they weren't people represented in the original manuscript and pretended it was its own thing, but I really didn't want to do that. Instead, I had to find a way to leave it open enough that, should (when) PL gets published, it all makes sense, but with enough of a story and conclusion that it leaves readers satisfied. I think I managed to do that.

That's it for me, hope you all have a nice weekend.

Hey! Because I'm always bad at this, if you're interested in buying Winter's Regret, it can be found

At Amazon or Smashwords or Createspace. Enjoy!