Mighty Paul Bunyon swings his axe…

…and the words tumble away. I did an editing pass on the first six pages of my new short story last night, and if I had used a red pen instead of a black it would have looked like the victim of a driveby shooting with an uzi. When I keyed in the changes this morning, the total word count went from 3500 to 2500. I was ruthless. In the first draft, I stuffed in a lot of detail that proved ultimately to be irrelevant.

The story is still very rough, and I’ve thought of some minor metaphorical work I want to do on it before I’ll consider the first draft finished. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it when it’s finished. I was inspired by the submission guidelines for a paying small press anthology, but I’ve heard some murmurings in the community that don’t give me a great deal of confidence about the publisher. I’m going to do some snooping around to see what I think before submitting it there.

I received my payment from Espresso Fiction for “Talking Old Soldier” yesterday, along with the promised feedback from readers, which amounted to five or six sentence-long compliments. Shrug.

I read Duma Key cover-to-cover this weekend. A very nice book. I’m tempted to turn around and read it all over again. There’s a lot of foreshadowing that I am interested to re-experience now that I know where it leads. Wireman is one of my favorite King characters, up there with Henry from Black House (Even a blind man could see…)

Phil has been brutal on Amazing Race this season. Every week has been an elimination round. Not a single reprieve. The Lithuania experience was sort of meh, though the festival surroundings when they were doing their detours looked like a lot of fun. Looks like there’s going to be a team meltdown next week. There always seems to be at least one couple who professes hate and starts yelling at each other.

I started watching Tin Man on SciFi last night once I realized Zooey Deschanel was in it, but it didn’t keep my interest, so I went back to editing my short story.