Baltimore’s City Paper<\/i> is running their annual short fiction contest.<\/p>\n
I knew it was coming up, but I didn’t know precisely when. I finally noticed it, in Wednesday’s edition (which, for whatever reason, I didn’t pick up until Thursday).<\/p>\n
The stories are due on the fifth. Friday. Guy Fawkes Day.<\/p>\n
I knew the story I wanted to submit. I hadn’t started putting down words, except for two paragraphs that go at the end. I was letting the story percolate in my mind. It’s dark and it’s edgy and there’s a moment of raw horror in it.<\/p>\n
To be honest, I didn’t want<\/i> to write it.<\/p>\n
Friday morning, I started the writing<\/a><\/p>\n I didn’t write a lot, honestly. It’s a page. It’s not in my “style” at all. (Yes, I have a style<\/a>. I’d never noticed before then.)<\/p>\n I’ve written two more pages. I think it will finish at six pages total. Fifteen hundred words, roughly. Maybe a little less.<\/p>\n (By way of contrast, this morning’s blog post on the Rally For Sanity<\/a> clocks in a hair under 3,000 words, and I wrote that in less than the running time of Green Day’s 21st Century Breakdown<\/i>.)<\/p>\n If you follow me on last.fm<\/a> and see me listening to, oh, something like Dido, I’m probably working on this short story. Because this story reaches down into some very dark places inside, places I don’t like to look, places I pretend don’t exist, and I need the light to counteract the dark.<\/p>\n I’ll be done well before Friday. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I do need to come up with a title, though. The title I have in mind right now is way<\/i> too much of a spoiler for the plot twist…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Baltimore’s City Paper is running their annual short fiction contest. I knew it was coming up, but I didn’t know precisely when. I finally noticed it, in Wednesday’s edition (which, for whatever reason, I didn’t pick up until Thursday). The stories are due on the fifth. Friday. Guy Fawkes Day. I knew the story IContinue reading “On Embarking Upon a New Story”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[753,4102],"class_list":["post-5429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-short-story","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5429\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}