The Story Match Challenge—Day 9: July 15, 2015

The word goal for Day 9 was a merciful 1,650 words; the challenge was going to be to convince the story it liked that length. Again, I randomly rolled for the two title components and came up with 2-Green and 73-in the Moon. Honestly, there are days when I think this generator needs a little more work.

The title immediately morphed into Greening the Moon-a Lunar Werewolf Story, because the whole lunar werewolf thing happened when I was writing my first flash fiction collection. The Lunar Werewolves are part of a series of poems and flash fiction that came out of Ode to Hummingbirds… and now I realise that, I will have to put them all in one place fore reference.

And speaking of realising things, I’ve noticed that all my science fiction, with one possible exception, is happening in the same universe: the lizardine and Odyssey are not definitely in the same universe, as are pretty much all of my colony stories. And that’s a good thing to realise, because it means that universe if bigger and more interconnected than I had hoped, and that the stories can enrich each other. Tracking it is going to be fun, but at least I realise that now, and not in six novels time.

I decided to get into the short story early today, not just because I have a lot to do, but because I need to be getting to bed earlier than 1 a.m. if I’m to avoid getting sick again. Apparently, my body has limits. I need to cut back to 15-hour days if I want to avoid another 8-week flu.

So, the writing. Well, I started around 10:30 a.m., but only had 900 words done by lunch time. By dinner, I’d managed to reach 2,400 and was thinking I only had two or three hundred to go. Boy, was I wrong. After the bath-time, dinner, bedtime routines were done, the story found more legs than I imagined it had and I was writing until 11:25 p.m. when it wound out at 5,316 words.

Needless to say, no flash fiction or poetry got done, but I was nicely surprised by a story that looks like it wants to turn into another novel. The novel will probably be called Greening the Moon, but the short story title morphed again to become Earth and Lunar Dreaming.

The Story Match Challenge: Complete—Earth and Lunar Dreaming (science fiction—5,316 words)

Word Total for the Day: 5,736 words