I snuck up on it and stabbed it in the back. There was lots of screaming and a little bit of gore. It died stubbornly, and when it had stopped twitching, I set it on fire and let it burn down to a pile of smoldering ash.
I had to; there was no other choice. It was the only way it could be reborn.
The manuscript was hideous. I couldn’t believe I’d written it, so bad was the prose. It reeked of high school campfire stories, where the storytelling was terrible even though no one really noticed. The goosebumps crawling up our arms had us all distracted.
I looked the pages over briefly, hoping to salvage something from them. A valiant notion, to be sure, but only a fragment still glimmered. This I rescued with a bitter grain of hope, dusting off the soot and polishing it until it sparkled again.
It is the seed of new life, reincarnated into a new world. The people are different, yet the same. The view out the window is black and dark, but then again the deep recesses of space hold little light. The chain of events is going to play out differently, but the end result will look much like it did before – the terror of invasion will be unavoidable.
Tags: critique, editing, Writing
03 Jul 06 Edit
I received my copy of Issue 6 from Apex over the weekend and absolutely devoured it in short order. I loved the writing, loved the stories, and can’t wait to grab the next issue. Of course, I now have to go back and purchase the first five issues, too. I think Apex will probably be one of the magazines that I buy a yearly subscription to.
Reading Apex has also inspired me to go back and rewrite Spore. After being rejected (even beforehand), I knew it needed a rewrite; I just didn’t have the inspiration at the time for the direction the story needed to go. I was relatively happy with the last half, but the first half just felt like it took too long to get into what I felt was the meat-and-potatoes of the story, so I want to get into the main events a little more quickly and develop them a little more fully. I also want to change the setting. And I was less than happy about the ending, so that will need to go, too. I guess I’m going to essentially gut the story, take it back to the outline, and start just one step beyond scratch. Maybe I’ll be happier with the final product, and maybe an editor will be happier with it, too.
Tags: apex-science-fiction-and-horror, editing, horror, science-fiction
