Late June: Eight Goals Accomplished

It had been a while since I checked off a goal on my list, had some other things I was working on, but finally got another one! Number eight!

I finished the rough draft of a horror story idea that I had. I had the idea rattling around in my brain for a while and finally carved out a little time to work on it. I didn’t quite know how long it would be, but because I know of plenty of publications that I'd like to submit to, and that have a 7,500 word limit for submissions, I wanted to try to get it under 7,500. In my head, that seemed doable, as the story didn’t feel so elaborate in my head. I figured I’d just write it all out and then see where I stood.

So, I wrote it. Completed… it was just over 9,000 words. OK, little long.

But that tends to happen to me when I write a first draft.

And truth be told, I did a second pass on it. It’s not just a rough draft, it’s a second draft… but not a final draft. I’ll likely do one more pass at it on another date. But after finishing it, I stepped away from it for a bit, and then returned to see if I could trim it down under 7,500 words. It wasn’t so difficult, just doing a pass-through and removing repetitive things, fixing up some language, trimming unnecessary stuff, doing the usual basic editing, I got it down close to 8,000.

But then, I knew I needed to trim another 500 words or so. So, I reread it and tried to envision the story as a whole.

I was thinking about great horror stories and movies, how they don’t give you too much. They hold back on a lot, only dangling terrifying ideas in front of you, but holding back on delivering the goods for a while. Of course, your horror story has to have horrific things in it. It can’t have too little, it will be boring. But there’s also such a thing as too much. Sometimes, what’s most scary isn’t the scary thing, it’s waiting for the scary thing. It’s the lead up. It’s the time-filled beforehand.

So, as I read through, I found a portion that I wrote– which was scary– but it was pretty similar to a different scary part. For a little context, this is a paranormal horror story. The main characters are dealing with a spirit in their home. I wrote a scene where the spirit enters the main character's bedroom while he sleeps. Then, I wrote another one, slightly different. Both scary in different ways. I scrutinized them both and realized I only needed one, not both. Having both of them may have been too much, and the second one didn’t add much to the story. It was good, in removing that portion, I was removing redundancies. I didn’t want the story to become repetitive and stale, and I think removing that section entirely helped.

And I got the story just under 7,500.

Proud of that.

And in removing the scene, I feel like it helped the progression of the story. I sometimes think of a horror story as taking many scary steps, getting closer and closer to the horrifying thing. You don't want any of the steps to be too big and get you too close with one extension of the leg, but also no baby steps, please. That kind of felt like that's what that scene was. A baby step. Throughout the story, I took 1 step forward, 1 step forward, and then with that scene, 0.5 steps forward. That caused the next step to also be 0.5 steps to get to that next level, before continuing on with the natural progression of 1 step at a time. When I removed that scene, it also removed the feeling of the progression and momentum suddenly slowing down, and allowed the story to keep moving forward at the same pace.

Or at least, I think. It's only a second draft.

I’ll likely go back and do another polishing-up of it later on, and then that story will be ready to be submitted to horror and speculative publications that I know of. But in the meantime, I completed the goal I had set for myself for 2025. Just finishing the rough draft of this horror story that was in my head. I needed to get it out on paper– or computer screen– before the idea lost its juice.

I squeezed that orange.

It’s almost ready to fill up a glass.