Hello, all,
I hope your 2015 is going well. Mine is proving to be a great year so far.
In my last post, I mentioned that I had started working on a new story for a call for submissions with the theme of Monsters; the only catch was that these monsters were meant to be real life monsters, like the ones you find on the street, at the pub or in your own home.
It took a few weeks of hard work, but the story has been completed and submitted with the title "Elisa's Choice." I had three readers give me their critiques and I made some rewrites based on their feedback. I am happy with the final product, but ultimately, it will be up to Grey Matter Press to accept it or reject it based on how it fits with their theme and with the other submissions.
I am optimistic about it, given that the story is quite personal and involves a real life monster close to a member of my family. "Write what you know" is what they say, after all.
I have to admit that I was nervous about some of the choices I made regarding this particular story, but I think it benefitted from those choices.
The story takes place over a span of two hours on a cold, winter night. I wanted the reader to be on the edge of their seats and I wanted to give him as few clues as possible about the outcome. To do this, I decided to break two of my rules: 1) I used the present-tense, and 2) Since dialogue is sparse, I chose to tell the story in the first person, so the reader could get deeper into Elisa's head and experience her emotions first-hand.
I believe the combination proved to be very effective. By denying the reader a 'hindsight' point of view, he is unable to tell the outcome. For example, if I write "I arrived at nine and noticed someone had broken into the house," you know I am currently alive, because I am speaking about the past. But if I write "I arrive at nine and notice someone has broken in," the reader has no way to know what comes next nor what the outcome will be. Will the narrator survive? There is only one way to find out.
We'll see how it all plays out, but until then... I'm keeping my fingers crossed.
H. J. Chacon