It's Quiet....A Little Too Quiet.......

(Another new piece of art for Interstellar Operations. Art is owned by Catalyst Games Lab, but it's still pretty neat!)

So, I'm 1600 words into a new Battlecorps story, and it's going well. the Characters are coming to life, the situation is coming along nicely, and I think it'll be finished in a week or two....

 But it's going a little too well......

Sometimes I have to fight stories in order to get them written. Sometimes, idea after idea roll off the fingers and what's supposed to be a short story suddenly has enough plot for a Novella. Other times, characters take on a larger role than you intended. And sometimes the story goes rocketing off the rails and into deep space. More often than not, I have to pull back and find out what I did wrong. Sometimes, it's cutting back to the point where the story goes off the rails and going from there. Other times, it's not as easy.

I generally have only one or two drafts of the story lying around on my hard drive, and maybe a file with the extra stuff from the working draft there, to used later on in the story, or for another story entirely. But there are times when I three, four, or five drafts of the story, twisting this way and that and I have to hammer it back into shape.

Two Battlecorps stories come to mind when I think about stories I have to hammer back into shape because they refused to fall into place. One was The Promise, which constantly refused to come into being. It took several drafts and hard thought to bring around. The second was Thirteen, which I first called Wolfsjager, then bounced between the two titles and plot for over a month, trying to find the story. I have a couple unfinished stories with the same problem I need to wrestle with, but this new one is going well, which makes me suspicious.

Maybe it will go smoothly, the story will write itself and maybe something unexpected will pop out and derail the story's train of thought. I've written enough to hope for the former, and expect the latter. Every writer has those periods when the story don't come into focus, and sometimes the best ways are to either power though it, or set it aside and work on something else. I done it both ways and had some success.

Well, off to bed -- this non-Battletech novel won't write itself and I need to ride the Battlecorps story as far as I can take it,. If it goes all the way to the end, I will be a happy writer. If not, I'll have to break out the power tool......

Later!!

Craig