Random thought: Why’s my DNA always asking, “Do these genes make me look fat?”
As I sweat out trying to make my March deadline, I realize I made at least one crucial mistake—I picked the shortest month of the year to finish up my latest draft. Not great planning. More on that later.
Since I’m pouring most of my waking time into the novel, I’ve picked another favorite story from my first book for this week’s tale. The prompt was donated by S.X. Stabile of N.E. Town Uchoose.
Last week I mentioned that I was returning to the movie set and that we’d be filming an adaption of my 101-word story, “Unfortunately, not everybody’s a baseball fan.” As it turned out, we decided to recast one of the lead roles, resulting in postponing the shoot. It will still happen as soon as we find the right actor. Stay tuned.
And now here’s the Story of the Week. Unlike the one mentioned above, once you read this story, you’ll see why it would be difficult to produce—unless it was animated (nothing I know anything about).
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They Think They Know Us So Well
“What’re you guys doing?” Taffy panted as she joined the other dogs at the dog park.
“Getting ready to play Bend Over For Rover,” Duke answered.
“Can I play?” Taffy asked. “Wait. What’s that?”
“We get our human’s attention. We start sniffing around like we’re gonna drop one and just when the human pulls out the poop bag and squats down, we move to another spot.”
“My human brags about how he knows right when I’m about to go,” Taffy said.
“That’s what makes it so fun. We have them doing squats like they’re at the gym. Humans—they’re freakin’ adorable.”
Prompt: Keep Them Guessing
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Novel News & Notes:
On the Questionable Characters front, I’m doing a better job of getting in more editing time, resulting in a shrinking manuscript. I’ve shaved about forty pages from the last draft. If I could lose another 20-30, I’d feel even better. I know it can be done. I just need to get brutal and find bigger chunks to lose. As I mentioned last week, I want to be down to 90,000 words and I’m at 95,700 now.
Maybe I should just feed the whole thing into ChatGPT and tell AI to cut out the superfluous material.
Yeah, no. That’s not gonna happen. This is my book—good, bad, or otherwise.
Let’s hope next week’s post is all about celebrating another finished draft sent off to the editor.
As always, thanks for listening.
Scotty out