On Friday, I realized I was not going to finish even the draft of my short story by our self-imposed deadline of the 21st so I cried uncle via Facebook. There were two other confirmed writers and one possible — we were each at different stages of “in progress” but no one was completely done.
This morning, I finished the first draft of what is now called, “Tracking Number” That draft clocked in at 5945 words — longer than I had anticipated but still well within our guidelines. After getting some feedback, I trimmed and plumped and adjusted some punctuation and mechanics. The new word count is 6195 which makes it officially the longest short story I’ve written to date.
I think our goal is still to collect all three (or possibly 4) stories into one Kindle e-book but to also make each story available separately.
It ended up in the ballpark of dystopian sci-fi which is where I was aiming, so that much is good. I also really liked the off-kilter world I created and, in the future — you know, when I have time and/or the muse strikes — I think I will write more short stories based in the same world that can then be collected into one book. It’s possible that some of my unfinished stories can be tweaked to fit into this world, so I may be able to do that sooner than later.
Once the collection is out in the Kindle store, we will be promoting the heck out of it including, likely, a limited time free promo; I’ll let you know when that happens!
Photo credit: “Private Eyes” CC-BY moriza, on Flickr