Not a lot to chat about and much to do today so I’m going to jump right into the Story of the Week, featuring a prompt provided by Elijah, a Barnes & Noble customer I met at a prior bookstore event. Kudos also go out to novelist Mike Latta for a superb editing suggestion he sent that I think made a huge difference to the final version of this week’s tale.
Zero to Sixty in a Flash
Fred hated car shopping. The otherwise mild-mannered accountant would snap like a twig as soon as the manipulation began.
So the instant that Jaxon, the slick salesman said, “Let me go talk to my boss,” Fred exploded.
“Right. You walk out and then come back with ‘the manager says we can’t go any lower.’ You guys are crooks.”
Jaxon nodded. “We know your type,” Jaxon smirked. “We call you guys customers who will never get the $1,000 rebate that we offer stable people.”
“You got a shorter name for people who apologize?”
“Yep. We call ‘em ‘gullible.’ Congrats on your purchase!”
Two quick items: First, I almost accidentally repeated last week’s mistake in my 101-word story writing. Once again, I grabbed a prompt from my inventory, took Scooter (the pandemic puppy) out on a walk and began brainstorming my idea. I had a pretty good story idea. I know this was the case because it was an equally great idea a year earlier when I wrote the first version. This one was going to be better, but when I got back home and found the original, I trashed the new one. Oh well. If reading this tragic tale felt like a colossal waste of time, let me make it up to you with Scooter’s four-year-old birthday post from last week’s Facebook page.
Finally, on the novel-writing front, Questionable Characters is moving forward, although not quite as quickly as I would like. I don’t feel like I’ve put in all of the editing time that I could have, and since I gave myself a deadline of April 18th to have this next draft done, I pledge to pick up the pace. I’m definitely making nice improvements, but I haven’t gotten as brutal as I’d like to yet, slashing words, paragraphs and maybe even entire scenes. I promise to sharpen up the scalpel and do better in the slice-and-dice department so I’ll have something that’s closer to feeling like a real book when I send it off to a developmental editor. More on the search for that person next week.
