Finished a Short Story
I haven’t finished a story in a couple of years.
I found a story that was about half written. The first version I found was from 2004. It was one where I had no idea how to end it. The story’s direction obviously wouldn’t work, so I dropped it around 2011 according to the date on the file. There are a bunch of ideas in a file from 2017, but they involved a lot of silly action and escape scenes.
I started writing at the end of the story, adding romance, and the ideas started to click. It wound up being a far future cyberpunk love story, which I am better at than action with guns and complicated plots.
I went back to the beginning and started foreshadowing the ending, and getting rid of some of the stupid things that I had added along the way.
The name of the story is “The Short Run,” but the story might be better called “The Long Run,” from the John Maynard Keynes quote: “In the long run we are all dead”.
Now I have to wait on it and then reread it so that I can find any stupid errors. The story is about 4,000 words and I will be sending it out to some pro sites later this week. There is no chance that the story will sell. Pro sites get more than 2,000 subs per month, and it is hard to get by the first round of slush. (I am convinced that slush readers think that SF is something like the Marvel Universe movies, either that or Star Wars.)
This story rightly belongs in the Error Message Eyes anthology, but it does involve space travel, so I’ll be putting it in the hard sf book that I am working on.