What do you do with alternate endings?
Ok, this is crazy.
I finished the 1st draft of EGtH and submitted to Critters. It stood around 19K words and a bit.
After some very good feedback from Critters, friends and family I took a sword to it, chopped it up and got it down to a manageable ~17.9K words. Which included eschewing the prologue, cutting back on adverbs and generally cleaning up the prose. This gave me Draft #2.
And then, of course, I read it again and came up with a different ending.
Sigh...
So I clean it up even more, without touching the ending pull off what I consider to be the best draft, the 3rd one, with the original ending. This one is ready to go. Ready to be sent. Ready to be submitted.
That nagging voice in my head won't leave me alone, though.
I had to write the alternate ending to see how I felt about it. It wasn't the final scene, no, that was pretty much intact from the day I conceived the story, but the end-game and how we get to that scene, yeah. Totally different.
So now I have 3rd Draft+ALT ENDING in my writing folder... and I'll be damned if I'm not liking it better. But there's no time! No time to submit to Critters, barely time to ask some family to look at it.
What should I do? Submit the newer ending?
I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to let it percolate a bit, hopefully get some feedback in the next few days before the submission deadline.
Man, this is difficult. Choices, choices.
Whatever I decide, I'm kind of glad to be done with it. I need to get this off my plate one way or the other. Everyone Goes to Hell, if it doesn't get any mentions in WoF, I will try sending to magazines and other publications. I like it. I really do.
But I need to move on from it. I've got some other ideas I've jotted down late at night. My fantasy story needs some time.
This is all incredibly fun, I just wish I would win the lottery already so I could dedicate myself to it full time.
- Chair!
I finished the 1st draft of EGtH and submitted to Critters. It stood around 19K words and a bit.
After some very good feedback from Critters, friends and family I took a sword to it, chopped it up and got it down to a manageable ~17.9K words. Which included eschewing the prologue, cutting back on adverbs and generally cleaning up the prose. This gave me Draft #2.
And then, of course, I read it again and came up with a different ending.
Sigh...
So I clean it up even more, without touching the ending pull off what I consider to be the best draft, the 3rd one, with the original ending. This one is ready to go. Ready to be sent. Ready to be submitted.
That nagging voice in my head won't leave me alone, though.
I had to write the alternate ending to see how I felt about it. It wasn't the final scene, no, that was pretty much intact from the day I conceived the story, but the end-game and how we get to that scene, yeah. Totally different.
So now I have 3rd Draft+ALT ENDING in my writing folder... and I'll be damned if I'm not liking it better. But there's no time! No time to submit to Critters, barely time to ask some family to look at it.
What should I do? Submit the newer ending?
I think that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to let it percolate a bit, hopefully get some feedback in the next few days before the submission deadline.
Man, this is difficult. Choices, choices.
Whatever I decide, I'm kind of glad to be done with it. I need to get this off my plate one way or the other. Everyone Goes to Hell, if it doesn't get any mentions in WoF, I will try sending to magazines and other publications. I like it. I really do.
But I need to move on from it. I've got some other ideas I've jotted down late at night. My fantasy story needs some time.
This is all incredibly fun, I just wish I would win the lottery already so I could dedicate myself to it full time.
- Chair!