dorinda

Haven story submitted! If all goes well, TroublesFest 2014 goes live sometime tomorrow, and authors are revealed in a week.

I can't be specific, due to the anonymity and all, but I did have to mention this: about halfway through the story, I felt stuck and unsatisfied with it. The voices were sliding away, and it felt trapped in the wrong sort of tone.

So I thought I would tuck it into my My Writing Spot space, which is a really nice, streamlined little online text editor. I usually have whatever story I'm currently writing (or brainstorming/note-taking/outlining) in there, in case I want to add things on a break at work, or just so I can get to it anywhere.

I pasted it in, and went to put a name on it. And when I did, I noticed that I had a doc in there with a similar name. Huh. Notes, probably, but to see if there was anything useful, I took a look.

A year (!) ago, I had wanted to write a Haven story with this same plot, just for fun and to fill a spot on a bingo card I had signed up for. And I remembered taking notes on it (I have them in my paper slash-notebook). What I didn't remember is that I actually WROTE OVER A THOUSAND WORDS OF IT, then stopped. I mean, I remember why I dropped pursuit of the idea, because I got last year's TroublesFest assignment (which asked for something different). But I had completely spaced the fact that I had gotten well into an actual story.

And this old draft was from a different character's POV, and had a different tone, both of which really helped crack the problem I was having with this year's draft. So I took the old draft, airlifted in the things I liked from the new draft, and was out of the mire and running again.

I would like to thank Last Year's Me for putting that stuff into the time machine. Thanks, pal. :D

(I would also like to encourage This Year's Me to do some memory exercises.)