Lunar Awards Submission Part I

The Story - The Writing - The Process

The time has come to start writing my third Friday Fiction story. By the time you are reading this I will already have started it and I’m likely on Twitch streaming myself finishing it off. I have to work fast because, as I mentioned on my last FIRST EDITION email, I’m entering the

Lunar Awards

. The submissions are due by April 19th, but I’m not worried as my own internal deadline is to finish this and have it sent to all of you by Friday, April 14th.

I want to document the process I take to write the story from beginning to end and thought this week’s and next, On Writing Fiction, would be a great outlet for me to share.

THE STORY

As I’ve said a multitudinous number of times, I already have my 10 fiction stories all planned out. Very bare bones. If you read my entire last email you will have seen a poll asking you which story you’d like to see me write. Both of them will be written, I just wanted to know which you thought should be my next one. An overwhelming number of you who answered like this one:

• A woman walks into a pub and turns into the most wanted man in the world. With everyone after her, can she convince them of her true identity or will the law catch up to her and execute her for the heinous crimes of someone else?

And so, this will be the story I’m going to release on April 14th. It practically writes itself but the trope I’m using here is “reincarnation.” More on the tropes aspect later.

THE WRITING

As I said I’ve already started writing this. But my process for writing short fiction goes as follows:

• Outline - As detailed as possible I want to jot down all the key points and moments that I know need to happen from beginning to end.

• Start writing the story without paying attention to word count.

• At about the halfway point of the outline I’ll check the word count to make sure I’m not too far over. If I’m dangerously close I’ll typically just try to wrap up the story with as few words as I can without compromising the outline. I know I can cut during the edit period.

THE PROCESS

Provided I finish this story by this Friday, April 7th, I’m going to get started on edits. The way I do it goes a little something like this:

• Write the vomit draft (4/5 - 4/7)

• Run the vd through PWA (ProWritingAid) (4/7 - 4/8)

• Apply PWA edits to vd to make it a 1st draft (4/8 - 4/9)

• Print out 1st draft and prepare my red pen edits (4/9 - 4/10)

• Get my trusty red pen and prepare to mark up my story. (4/10 - 4/11)

• Apply red pen edits to make it a 2nd draft. (4/12)

• Read 2nd draft out loud to myself and apply those edits to make it a 3rd draft. (4/13)

• Put 3rd draft through PWA one last time to make it a final draft. (4/14)

• Prepare story to publish on Friday, April 14th.

This is my process for short fiction I write for submission. Were I writing to publication on Amazon (for example) I would be adding editor(s) after my initial “final draft” stage which would then produce multiple “editor drafts.”

Next week, I should either be at the red pen edit stage or at least applying my red pen edits so I can do my read out loud and get to the PWA final draft by next week Thursday.