Life, Writing, Weirdness

I have a new writing rule. Every story that reaches a completed first draft gets scheduled for a re-read six months after that first draft is done, and it better have had that re-read no more than nine months after completion.

This is a strange rule, Lance. Why are you doing that?

Because, although it’s taken a while to sink in, I’ve noticed a trend. No matter how awful I think a story is when I finish it, or how much worse it seems as I let it recede in memory, when I eventually come back to it, it’s never remotely as bad as I thought it was. Some of them are actually pretty good. In fact, most of them are at least decent. I have at least a dozen examples now, things I’ve pulled out years after the first draft just to see how much they’d make me wince. Every time I finish one of the rereads, I’ve managed to treat it as the “make revision notes” step between the first and second drafts and then move on immediately to the second draft.

A surprising number of these are at the novelette and novella lengths, which is interesting. There were about twenty shorts with a five- to eight-year gap between those first two drafts, but half of them were left over from extra stories I drafted as potential for inclusion in The Undead, a collection I published independently in 2020.

But since early 2025, I’ve pulled out 4 novelettes and 4 novellas (one of which was a novelette when I started reading it again) and found they were all at least decent. Time laps between first and second draft ranges from six to seventeen years. Yes, really. I’ll provide three examples: the Good, the Okay, and the There’s a Good Story in Here Somewhere, all of which were originally drafted in 2013.

The Good: I finished the first draft of Last of the Sorcerer-Kings in December 2013, vaguely unsatisfied but unsure why. I read it in late August this year and found it to be a fun Heroic/Adventure Fantasy story that just needed a few tweaks here and there, several of which were along the lines of, “this character’s name changed twice so fix that.” The second draft added about 1400 words which sounds substantial except that it’s only about 6% of the total story length and I’ve had bigger changes from first to second draft in the course of normal edits. This was the most recent old story I pulled out.

The Okay: Klaatu Barada Nicto, Baby! dates from the same era, the first draft complete in April 2013. The central story was solid, but I’d rush through a lot of transitions and glazed over some important details. A few deletions, a few additions, a few adjustments, and I’m very happy with the second draft.

There’s a Good Story in Here Somewhere: Shakespeare’s Sisters was an 11,000-word Science Fiction novelette that I “finished” in November 2013. The word “finished” is in quotes because there were several scenes in the middle that were actually only one sentence summaries: “Write a scene where this particular action happens.” When I read it, the first half was good, the last third was okay but needed some fleshing out including those missing scenes, and the bit in between, an important bridge, was almost non-existent. I made some notes before putting it away for a little while. When I pulled it out again, I made a few more notes and did a bunch of plotting of the missing third of a story. Fixing that, writing the scenes that were missing, and adding several more into the back half of the story to make certain events work better, at the end of the second draft, I now had an almost 21,000-word novella. It’s since had a third draft that took it to just over 23k words and I’m rather happy with the result.

Other work that’s had a similar treatment:

Good

• “Welcome to the Swamp”, SF, 1^st draft 2019, 2^nd draft 2025, 9k novelette, now 10k.
• “Island of Heroes”, Superhero, 1^st draft 2016, 2^nd draft 2025, 9k novelette, now 10.5k.
• “Closing Time”, SF, 1^st draft 2012, 2^nd draft 2025, 11k novelette, now 12k.

Okay

• “Ship of the Line”, SF, 1^st draft 2007, 2^nd draft 2025, 13k novelette, now 15k. But I think it might still be lacking something.
• Lake of Stars, SF, 1^st draft 2018, 2^nd draft 2026, 16k novelette, now 17.5k novella. And it works much better now.

There’s a Good Story in Here Somewhere

• A Gathering of Heroes, 1^st draft 2014, 2^nd draft 2026, 22k novella, and I’m not sure where this one will wind up for length as I’m only about a third of the way through making notes, but it’s going to need significant expansion to finish telling the story I wanted to tell.

Still to come:

• Company of the Dead, 18k F novella drafted in 2014.
• Hello, My Name Is…, 25k SF novella drafted in 2008
• Sleep of History, 17k SF novella drafted in 2007.

All three of those I think will probably fit into There’s a Good Story in Here Somewhere, but I’m prepared to be pleasantly surprised. The first two worry me a little, because they were both drafted inside the first year I started to take my writing seriously.

Once I’ve pulled all those out and dusted them off for decision-making, I’ll try to make faster progress on the nearly thirty story fragments I’ve started but never taken anywhere. I’ve managed to reduce that number by about five in the last year, so there’s hope there, too.

The point of the matter overall is that maybe I’ve been a better writer than I think I am for a long time now. My writing career, if I want to think of it that way, could have been further along than it is. I’m still typing though, so things aren’t over yet.

But I’m still afraid to open the first draft of that very first novel completed on 26 April 2008. Dragon Summer may never be fit for other human eyes.

Be well, everyone.