The Stubborn Side Of Writing (1)

By the time the spring of 2009 rolled around, I was sufficiently recovered from the battle scars that I gained during the disastrous adventure that was my first self-pubbed novel to take another crack at self publishing. I felt extremely confident about my abilities to write a good story, and since I came up with a plan during the interim that called for me to self-pub a bunch of chapbooks and try to establish myself as a writer, I felt that now would be good time to implement it.

Since I had all the components in place at the time ("publisher", money, rudimentary marketing strategy) all I needed to make this plan a reality, was a good medium length short story.

Problem was, what short story should I use as the opening salvo to my master plan of making me a semi-well known writer. Although I had quite a few to choose from, the minimum page constraints that the "publisher" had had forced me to narrow my selection down to a story that met that minimum page requirement (which was 44).

The one story that met that particular requirement, "A Betrayal of Vows", was one that I spent a considerable amount of time trying to covert into a novel (about six months or so), but had recently put it away because I had written myself into a small corner with it.

I actually gave this particular story a lot of thought, not only because I was trying to convert it into a novel, but it was one of the first stories that I posted here on Cedar's Mountain, back when I was trying to first establish myself as a blogger before I added writing to the mix to make myself what I am today, a blogger/writer. So if I wanted to self-pub this story and have people buy it, I would have to remove it from my blog.

And that's what I did. I reluctantly went back to the first year of my blog and nuked all 35 posts that were related to that particular story. With the exception of taking down my short story "Cedar Mountain" so that it could eventually be published in Beat To A Pulp, that particular block of posts remains the only posts that I've ever removed from this blog.

Anyways, I dug out the story and got right to work on it, because the version I had posted here was quite frankly, a piece of garbage. I originally wrote it during my fertile and personally forgettable year of 2006 and what I learned in the subsequent years, was that the original story was a piece of shit. The only good thing about that original story, was that it became a thirty-five plus page outline for me to work from.

Up next: turning that thirty-five page outline into a reasonably coherent and entertaining story.