El Finito!

I finished a story! Finally! This may not seem to be a big deal to many of you, but I haven’t finished anything since the first draft of a story (still unrevised) a year ago, and only two stories in the last two years. But I recently joined a writer’s group, and I promised I would have a story for last night’s meeting.

It was harder than I remembered. I futzed around for the better part of a week before getting down to brass tacks. I finished it up at work yesterday - an hour at lunch and an hour after I knocked off for the day. Final tally - about 2,000 words yesterday alone. Some of them are pretty good, too, especially the ending, which came out exactly as I wanted.

The story was inspired by Paul Guyot’s armored car challenge, issued on his blog a couple of years ago. I mapped out the idea and started work on it but put it aside when I found I wasn’t able to meet the deadline. Then just the other day I saw that Gerald So’s story in the same contest had been published, and remembered how much I liked what I’d done on mine.

And the writing group liked it. Which was cool, because they’re all pretty good writers themselves. Last night, for example, a woman named Kira handed out chapter 3 of her novel-in-progress. I had read chapter 2 at the previous meeting, and it wasn’t bad, just sort of middling. But reading her new stuff I started to get excited because it was really, really good. I could barely wait until everyone else had finished reading before I launched in about how well done it was and the (minor) ways it could be improved.

I haven’t even mentioned Chris’ story, which was based on old science fiction stories like Flash Gordon, but gave it a silly tone, which was very funny. So now I’m excited to be back writing, and I hope it continues.

Going to the Mats. It’s Wimbledon time again, and I thought I’d send along a very interesting interview with a tennis star from the ’80s, Mats Wilander. On court he had a rather boring persona (almost Sampras-esque), but it turns out he’s really a pretty interesting guy.