I just finished a rough draft of a story for the Haunted Legends anthology, edited by Nick Mamatas and Ellen Datlow. It takes place at Unit 731 — an experimentation/concentration camp in China during WWII. Not sure if it’ll make the grade and get accepted, but more importantly, I’m glad to just get a story completed. It has been over a year since I’ve written any fiction and my writing is probably not as sharp as I’d like it to be due to the lack of practice, but hey, you have to start somewhere right? Every now and then I had an idea for something and wrote down a few lines, but either lost interest or lost conviction in the strengh of the prose. But this time I really just forced myself to plow through it, to get the full story down on paper and worry about cleaning it up later, and you know what? — it really wasn’t as hard as I thought.
I think Chuck Palahniuk said it best when he likened that first draft of a book or story to forcing a lump of coal out your backside. It’ll be painful and the result will be dirty and ugly. But inside that lump is a diamond that you just need to chip away to find. Might take a whole lot of polishing, but it’s in there somewhere.
I’ve got plenty of work left to do on it, but that first hurdle is over. Hopefully this will be the start of a trend.
More coal on the way…
Posted by mdekler 