Contests

Entered "Frame by Frame" in the SpecFic Contest, and I just printed off a new story to enter in Wrtiers of the Future. This is not a goof like "In Deep Shit," but an honest-to-goodness serious science-fiction story. I was just about at the point when I thought I'd burned all the seriousness out of myself; everything I wrote seemed to come out funny, and I was living for those moments when I'd get a big laugh at a punchline at my writer's group meetings. Then this story came reeling out one night. I cried when I wrote it, and The Wife cried when she read it, so I guess you could say it's not so much a comedy.

Starting back to work on Flip is not easy. I wrote a couple of scenes pretty easily, but they were basically transitional scenes. I'm coming up on a real meat-and-potatoes action sequence, a "production number" as my old screenplay teacher used to call it, and I'm seriously frightened of starting. The book already has about a million logical holes in it, and I'm terrified that I'll never solve them and the whole book will just be crap. But I'm afraid to try to go back and solve some of those problems until I've finished the first draft. It's one of those Ourobouros dilemmas, a snake feeding on its own tail, and it's the kind of thing that caused my previous paralysis on the book. I thought I'd solved it, but now it looks like I just pushed it back a few pages. Now it's back.

I've got to break through this thing and get moving. Maybe I should ask for help.