You write, you learn. Today I learned what it means to really write a first draft. Two weeks ago, I wrote the first 900 words of a new story, targeted for the second Machine of Death anthology. Two scenes written, but neither of them really resonated with me for what I was trying to achieve. I needed moody, intense, and gloomy to the point of depression; I got an amateur’s first attempt at a hard-boiled police procedural.

Today I picked up where I left off and—daring to be bad as Kevin J. Anderson once instructed us—plodded on along the same lines. Approaching the first essential revelation after another 500 words, I stumbled on the point-of-view depth, voice, and even verb tense I need.

Of course, that means going back and rewriting the whole thing from scratch*.

Oh well. In programming and technical support, a new error message is considered progress, so perhaps I can say the same about throwing out 1,500 words and writing a bunch of new ones?

Nuff said. There’s intense and gloomy prose to write!

* Though I may be able to salvage some of the terser dialogue lines.