We now return to our regularly scheduled programming

Apologies for the blog hiatus last week. Now that I'm back, it's time for an update!

I've been frantically trying to finish up a short story for a looming deadline (part of the reason for last week's blog oops).

I heard about a submissions call that really got me excited. I came up with a good, solid idea for a story and cranked out a first draft. I patted myself on the back and thought, "I’m going to have this ready in no time!"

HA!

Sometimes you get a story idea, but it just won’t pan out, no matter how hard you try; sometimes you get a story idea, the whole thing writes itself, and you hardly have to do more than a few tweaks and a polish and it’s ready to send; and sometimes . . . sometimes you get the story I’m currently working on.

It’s called Patient 1437. I wrote the first draft and thought I had a pretty good story. During first revision, however, I realized some of the story events didn’t make sense (like why would my scientist decide to experiment on himself? It didn't make sense in the context of the story). So I fixed those problems. And those fixes made other parts of the story not make sense. So I fixed those. And so on, and so on, until the story barely resembles the original idea. It was a lot of extra work (and a dozen--A DOZEN--revisions), but it’s a good, solid story now. So (knock on wood), I’m hoping to finish the final polish today and get it sent out.

This will be my fifth short story submitted so far this year. Which explains why I’m so behind on novel revision.

Speaking of which . . . once this short story is out the door, I’m swearing off short work and diving back into novel revision. I’d originally set a goal of having revisions done by June (HA!), then pushed the goal back to December when I realized how much work remained to be done on the novel. If I don’t get off my duff and get cracking, I won’t make that deadline, either (I’m already skeptical).

On the waiting game side of things, I'm still waiting back for word on the four stories I've submitted, and I'm still waiting for the announcement of the release of Zombidays. The story I have in it is a zombie-comedy (a Zomb-edy?) It's an extra-special story for me because it’s an "almost true" story. Most of the events in the story actually happened (minus the zombie, of course) during the time I worked for a large retailer. And, since I worked the overnight shift, most of my coworkers and I shambled around like zombies half the time, so even that part of the story has a grain of truth to it. It’s funny and sarcastic and ironic, and even makes a statement about how big business views their employees (zombies, and laughs, and story-morals, oh my)!

Of course, I just want to get my hands on it as a reader, too, because it’s a zombie-exclusive anthology and I just can't get enough of zombies!

So that's the plan for the rest of July: the waiting game and more novel revision.