The truth about blogging

I wrote another thousand words on my new story this morning. 900 words continued where I left off yesterday and 100 words were the final paragraphs, which came to mind to me sometime yesterday. They maybe not be the absolute final paragraphs, but it’s the story kicker. The “oh shit” moment.

The first draft is going to be longer than I anticipated. I’m currently at about 2100 words, and I’m sure there will be at least another 1000 and perhaps 2000 words because I’m facing a scene that’s going to have a fair amount of description. I hope to come in under 4000 words. After editing, it’ll probably drop back to 3500, maybe even 3000.

Speaking of “oh shit” moments, there was a perfect example on The Unit last night. That dreadful, sinking feeling that you’ve just done something with enormous repercussions and there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle. It happens at the prison, when Tiffy realizes not only the truth of who the man is that she’s visiting, but how the information she inadvertently provided to him will come back to haunt one of her best friends very soon. Brilliant writing.

“The Geezers” (5 Stories) is a mystifying Straub story. He goes out of his way to not tell readers stuff, leaving us to piece together a jigsaw puzzle without a cover photo to work from. In the afterword he says the story is “a fascinating exercise in withholding everything that might explain what the protagonists and their friends were up to, and describing instead their reactions to the consequences of the unstated actions.” The only thing I don’t like about the story is the way he shifts from a detailed exploration of the habits of all the geezers in the first half to almost exclusively focus on a single character for the rest of the tale. It makes the story feel somewhat unbalanced.

I upgraded the YaBB software on my message board last night. Of course, I ran into a couple of glitches along the way, but I got them sorted out and didn’t lose anything. It looks pretty sharp, and supposedly has enhanced spam protection. I haven’t had any spammy posts since it went live, so that’s a hopeful sign. With the previous version I was getting hit left and right until I added some custom mods to keep people from particular domains from registering.