The Goldilocks Zone<\/em> is an anthology of short stories, and is my first success in publishing.<\/p>\n\n\n\nI first wrote Unclaimed Goods<\/i> with the intention of sending it to Sheila Williams at Azimo<\/i>v’s<\/em>. The idea for the story came to me while I was in an airport, on my way to WorldCon in San Antonio. After attending a meeting with Sheila, I knew I had to write the story. Shortly after returning home, I sat in a Starbucks on a Saturday morning, and completed the first draft by that afternoon.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe short story went through two professional workshops and my writer’s group. I received a lot of positive feedback and a few ideas for how to improve it, but nothing substantial. I never did submit it to Asimov’s<\/em>. I sort of abandoned it and moved on to other things.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSeveral months ago, when I saw the opportunity to submit it to Flying Ketchup, I opened Unclaimed Goods<\/em> and looked at what I had. The story was good, but I saw a few places I could make it better. I made some minor changes, broadening the scope and tightening the prose. I submitted the story, and they loved it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nUnclaimed Goods<\/em> was lost only in the sense that I’d given up and forgotten about it. Recovery was as simple as remembering it existed and applying the skills I learned since writing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSpin City<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\nLike Unclaimed Goods<\/em>, I knew where the story was. I could go find it. I even had printouts. The problem was that I first wrote it when I was a teenager, and it was kind of terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOriginally called The Arthur Kane Stories<\/em>, it was three short stories fused together, covering the three most important cases in the private investigator’s life. I had some good ideas, but I didn’t know what I was doing when I wrote the stories, and I put too much of myself in the main character.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor years, I had trouble moving on. I kept wanting to go back and fix this one story. I told people I was a writer, and that I had this finished novel, but I stopped sharing it because I knew how bad it was. The voice in my head would yell, “But still! I’m a writer, damn it! I wrote a whole book! I just need to FIX it!”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Two years ago, I fixed it. This was after I’d finished The Repossessed Ghost<\/em>, so my first novel became my second. I lifted the names and some of the events from the old story and dropped them into a fresh outline. I changed the narrative from third person to first person, and I leaned into some of the noir elements I accidentally included in the original draft. Sherlock Holmes and Harry Dresden influenced me, and for Nanowrimo 2017, I wrote the first 50,000 words of Spin City<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe story was lost in the sense that it only ever existed in larval state. Once I grew enough as a writer to give the story the treatment it deserved, I rewrote it. I opened a new project and started from scratch, placing a few of the old bones in a new body. I recovered Spin City<\/em> by recreating it, fresh and new.<\/p>\n\n\n\nSynthetic Dreams<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\nAs of this writing, the first draft of Synthetic Dreams<\/em> still isn’t done. I’m working on it. For a while, I had to put it down, and I was afraid I would need to abandon it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe summer of 2017, before I dove into Spin City<\/em>, I had this brief idea for a story set about a hundred years after The Singularity. The idea was small, but the scope huge. In July or August, I tried writing a couple of chapters. I didn’t have an outline and I didn’t know what the story was really about. I just had the idea, and my test chapters worked. I thought I might be able to turn it into an entire novel.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThen I had to focus exclusively on Spin City<\/em>, so my initial idea for Synthetic Dreams<\/em> got filed away. I spent most of 2018 finishing the first draft of Spin City<\/em>, completing the first draft just before heading to New York City for the Writer’s Digest conference.<\/p>\n\n\n\nOn the Writing Excuses Cruise in 2018, I was working on a novelette, The Exorcism of Jack Evans<\/em>. As an exercise for the cruise, I wrote a full outline for Synthetic Dreams<\/i>. Out of the blue, the idea became real and I knew I had to write it.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFor Nanowrimo 2018, I wrote the first 50,000 words of Synthetic Dreams<\/em> in around 19 days. Going into it, I didn’t think I could write that fast, especially this weird third person story about genderless non-humans.<\/p>\n\n\n\nIn 2019, I needed to work on the next draft of Spin City<\/em>. Twice, I had to stop working on Synthetic Dreams<\/em> so I could focus on the other story. I went so long without working on it that I forgot how to move forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe vision was gone. My ideas left me. I wrote half a novel and I didn’t know the characters anymore, or where they were going. I no longer knew how they were going to solve the mystery. I lost the story. It was gone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I still had my outline and a bunch of notes. I poured over all of the material I had, but I struggled to get the flavor of the story back in my mouth. I didn’t know what to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I wound up going back to the beginning and revising with fresh eyes. The story wasn’t finished, but I had 50,000 words I could edit. The exercise forced me to read the story critically. The process rewired my brain for the story I wanted to tell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I reached the point in my story where the words ended and I needed to keep going, I was on Writing Excuses Cruise 2019. To my shock and amazement, the words flowed. It felt slow and clumsy at first, but I found the story inside me after all. I picked up the threads and moved forward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I lost Synthetic Dreams<\/em> through time and distance. I recovered it by immersing myself in the story I still had, trusting myself as a storyteller to be able to fill in the blanks and keep going when I ran out of material. I wound up having to rewrite some of the outline, but that’s okay. I went through the same thing when drafting Spin City<\/em>. There’s something about the 3\/4 mark of the story that throws everything out of whack.<\/p>\n\n\n\nA Clean Slate<\/em><\/h2>\n\n\n\nMy last example of a story I’ve lost is actually the subject of my post for tomorrow, so I’m not going to get too much into it today. It was my first Nanowrimo attempt, and I still think the idea is worth writing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The recovery of A Clean Slate<\/em> is going to take elements from all the previous examples. It’s a story that’s sat in my head for years, similar to The Arthur Kane Stories<\/em>. It’s one I’ve lost the threads for, like Synthetic Dreams<\/em>. My plan is to try it in Nanowrimo again, this time with an outline so I don’t get lost along the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\nParting Thoughts<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
I have other stories that I started and abandoned that I may never try to recover. There’s one about an order of mystical knights that celebrate the day, that must grapple with the idea of a demon finding redemption. There’s another story that’s inspired by a song, which involves a dancer becoming the warrior her people need in order to throw back a monstrous horde.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I said earlier in the month that ideas are cheap, and they are. I have lots of ideas and I can make more. There is no end to the number of stories I can tell. The only thing I’m short on is time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The penultimate Blogtober post is upon us, and today’s topic is one I’ve been looking forward to all month. I have lost several stories over the years. I also have managed to recover several of them. Today, I’m going to go over four examples of stories I lost and recovered, and the different techniques I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1319,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions\/1319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/briancebuhl.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}