this fictionette went to the art gallery two weeks late
Wed 2016-01-27 01:03:46 (in context)
- 1,134 words (if poetry, lines) long
Well, hallelujah. It's a fictionette. This is the one that should have gone up on January 15. It's about as late as a fictionette's ever been. It's called "The Artist's Apprentice" (that's the teaser; subscribers click here for the whole thing in PDF and/or MP3) and it's a reinterpretation of the fairy tale "The Goosegirl." Now that I think of it, I sort of blundered in naming the characters. I forgot that the titular Goosegirl is in fact the genuine princess; it's her role in her betrothed's kingdom while her maid is pretending to be her. The impostor herself was never a goosegirl at all. But oh well. These things happen. I don't think the fictionette much suffers for it.
In fact, I'm kind of pleased with it. Which is surprising, given how much at a loss I was to even begin, back on the day when it was due. The original freewriting session turned out only a very verbose outline of the way the story should go, and not a single rough draft scene I could start from. I have a bad habit of babbling to myself about story ideas during half my freewriting time, like I'm trying to talk myself into finally diving in. It's not a bad way to get started on a larger project. It's a great way to make me cuss out my past self when it's time to start the week's fictionette.
Anyway, my hope is to have the belated January 22 fictionette out by the end of this week. I'd love to have it out tomorrow, but I know better than to make a rash promise like that, especially on a Wednesday. I'll be starting the thing from scratch, from the freewriting session output I selected to be the fictionette's bare bones. If I have it out by the month's fifth Friday, that'll be fantastic. Then I'll do all the end-of-month stuff over the weekend. And then I can start February fresh and new and perfectly on time.
That's the goal, anyway. We'll see how long it lasts.
Stay tuned for Wednesday night's blog post, which will be full of whining and excuses but also, quite probably, epiphanies. (I had a lightbulb moment last night which I'm sitting on until it can get a blog post of its very own.)