I drafted a new short story back in January -- the first for a while. I've been too busy since to dust it off, but finally got back to it last night. In the spirit of my script dissection of The Last Clockwinder, I'd love to dump the current draft here so people can see the WIP -- BUT I don't want to kill of my own first publication rights by doing that either!
Anyway, it's about wizards in space. Here's the (current and not-for-long) opening:
Free-floating in space, Meiro convulses in panic. She fights for breath, she fights – pointlessly, it must be said, in blind, animal instinct – to drag herself back to the safety of the ship. She fights the chill grip that wraps itself around her as her cells threaten to burst and her blood freeze.
Behind her, the Merula streaks away. Ahead, the interceptor manoeuvres to a stop, orienting itself so the grab team can launch itself directly from the airlock. It’s hard for her to take the threat seriously, though, while she drifts suitless in vacuum. To her left—
A miracle.
Specifically, what made me want to write this was a collision of ideas: in the Dresden Files, wizards are powerful, but catastrophically wreck technology by their very presence. What happens when you put wizards with that aura effect in a high-tech, Expanse-style setting? How do absurdly, continental-shelf-shatteringly powerful beings cope with being cut off from an expanding universe?
During my readthrough and with particular reference to Writing Advice From A Slush Reader by Evelyn Freeling, here are the main things that stuck out to me that need changing:
It's surprisingly overwritten. I say 'surprisingly' because I'm usually pretty good at economy and flow within prose. It's serviceable, but I want more than 'serviceable'. This is an easy (and enjoyable!) thing to fix on an edit pass -- although that'll be the last thing on this list to get done.
Too much lore-dumping. This stems from a complex story-world setup playing poorly with short-form fiction. The answer here, I think, is largely yeeting it, but I plan a pass where I work on inveigling those things better into the story. The important elements of it, at least. This will likely be a combination of 'figure out how this lore actually manifests in concrete ways', 'slip in a sentence here and there rather than whole paragraphs', and 'trust the story/reader more'.
Craft issue: general structure/intercutting. The current draft flips between the 'now' and the 'then'. See the Freeling blog above on this. I've done this before in another (unfinished) story and rightly been pulled up on it. The blog has a good take on this here, I think, in that people reach for it as an arresting opening image BUT don't get back to that same height. I wonder if it's also drawing on a more cinematic style of a 'cold open' and intercutting, which makes far less sense in prose. I did wonder if I could get away with it, but on balance NO I think it needs work.
Craft issue: opening question. Related to that, I think there's a bunch of crafty techniquey things I can do on the first few pages to redress that balance with point 3. I think the premise/setup of the story has a solid opening question, so it's doing the work to surface that better.
Thematics. And linked to that, too little background on/interest in the MC. The deuteragonist has more spice about her that we just don't get from the MC. Their stories need to connect up more based on what they're each bringing into the story, rather than just through what happens within it.
Right now, I'd say it's an acceptably written account of some cool things that happen. But it doesn't sing as a story. Not all the elements are pulling in the same direction, and the technical side doesn't bring out what is there enough. But I'm pleased to feel like I have a solid plan forward. I appreciate that reading about this without the context of an actual draft may feel pointless. But this is my thought process on it, nevertheless.