Building A Better, Stronger And Maybe A Smidge Faster Story

It rained today, so I wrote and subbed two stories and read. It was pretty much a perfect writerly day.

And I solved a problem. I was almost going to give on the whole writing a cyborg story idea, and not just because the competition to nab one of the few slots left for unsolicited works for that particular anthology will be fierce. It's called a challenge! But the deadline was too close and nothing was working for me. So I gave up, only to discover the deadline had been extended by a month. Hope returned. Maybe it could still happen. I tinkered, but to no avail. Then today my brain kicked into high gear and noisily shifted pieces around like the changing sets in Inception. I realised that if I merged the background for my first unsuccessful cyborg story attempt with parts of the plot for my second unsuccessful cyborg story attempt, maybe I had the glimmer of a goer. A third ingredient then presented itself as I was settling carryover characters into their new environment, and now I have a story that excites me. If nothing else, I like to finish what I start, and if I eventually end up with a cyborg story under my belt, no doubt I will feel sooo accomplished. :)

I still haven't written a zombie story though. Maybe one day I'll come up with trail blazing tale about putrid corpses that appeals to me. The BBC series In the Flesh proves that the walking dead still have a lot of life left in them as vehicles for entertaining and meaningful storytelling, and that there's always another fresh, if somewhat whiffy in this case, angle to even the most weary and worn out tropes waiting to be discovered by intrepid writers.