Those Words

Robert Heinlein has five famous rules for writers.

They're all valuable, but today, I just want to talk about rule two. I've really been working on rule one this year. Every day I write. That wouldn't be as useful, however, if I didn't keep rule two.

Well, today I achieved another victory in the fulfillment of rule two.

Yessir, that's my baby! No sir, don't mean maybe. I started a story called "Digital Wizards" on the 30th of March. I expected it to be a relatively short story, but it didn't cooperate with me. Yesterday morning, I typed "the end," and checked the word count. The story ended up at 36,235 words. That's even a titch longer than my last overly long novella "The Elephant in the Room" that I wrote in January.

That's pretty exciting. It's always exciting to reach the end of a story. Unfortunately, it's a constant process. It doesn't work like this:

Instead, it's like this:

So, tomorrow, I'll have to go back to Heinlein's rule number one, and write another thousand words. I'm a little nervous about that, as always. Will I be able to? I think I'm going to go back to the book that I began when Marshal did his "Journey Into Journey" contest. He gave me the song, "Still They Ride" for my inspiration. I came up with an idea that was basically The Lone Ranger in space. I started it, got about 5,000 words in, then realized that it was going to be a novel and not just a short story, and I needed something else. So, I quit...or shelved it anyway...and wrote a cheesy Star Wars story about some old imperial biker scouts after the empire has fallen who love the rush of riding speeder bikes so much that they'll risk it all to go out and zip around on them from time to time.

I had an idea about how to make the original Lone Ranger idea work this month, and I guess I'm going to see if I can't put that into practice, and write the original book from beginning to end. If that works, it'll be the second story that Marshal got me started on that I finish in this writing every day process. Thanks, Marshal. The book is going to be called "Still They Ride: A Lazerfist Story" or something like that. Lazerfist is the main character...The Lone Ranger. If it goes well, maybe I'll do more tales about him in the future. Who knows?