As I suspected, much of what I wrote yesterday morning didn’t really survive in its original form, but I didn’t expect it to get rewritten so quickly. I’d made a false start on this story in February, when I was going in a different direction with it, but I figured out in my dreams last night that the opening scene I’d written back then was actually a better, more interactive way of introducing the characters. So I went back to the old material (which I’d simply pushed down to the bottom of the Word document instead of deleting it) and put the two days’ worth of writing into a creative blender. It’s now a hybrid of sorts—I liked the tension of the original version and the motivation of yesterday’s work, and I hope I captured some of both in the new rendition.
I’m up to about 2300 words on the story, though I’m not so concerned with length at this point. I can go as high as 7000 words for this market. Right now, I’m trying to get the plot hashed out. I understand most of the scope of the story, but I’m not sure where or how I’m going to end it. The story isn’t really about the plot so much as some moral and philosophical choices made by the main character. Since it’s a jury trial story, I can’t very well go through an entire case in 7000 words, so I’m going to have to make some decisions about what to show and what to tell. And I haven’t really figured out how it’s going to end. A comeuppance of some sort, I expect, but that’s not clear to me yet. Hopefully after a few more days of work on the first draft I’ll get some ideas. I don’t have a title yet (the old one, Jury Pool, no longer fits).
I had a brief scare with my iPod yesterday. It was hooked up to the FM transmitter/recharger in my car, but when I got in the car at noon, it was dead. Flat dead. Blank. There are only so many buttons on the thing a person can push. I was hoping that it was just a matter of the battery being flat, that the car charger had somehow not done its job. No matter how I jiggered the connections, no sign of life. As soon as I plugged it into my computer at home last night, all returned to normal. For some reason or other, the car charger hadn’t been working, but when I plugged it into the car this morning, the little lightning bolt showed up in the battery. If the iPod had actually crapped out on me, I had no plans to get a new one. Not after spending as long as I had feeding it 4500 songs.
So, 24. Interesting developments. I haven’t watched the show before this season, so I have no idea of such a sudden change of direction is par for the course, or if they just ran out of story for the Fayad plot. It’s a risky move. Assuming the next several weeks represent a new tangent, I could safely stop watching right now and not really feel like I’ve missed anything.
