Conflicted

Well, I just put the finishing touches tonight on a short story I've had kicking around for a while. As I read it one last time, something kept bothering me, but I couldn't put my finger on it at first. The writing was clean. The dialogue was cute. The characters were fairly engaging. I smiled in parts... but... but... still, somehow... overall it was BORING.

It took me a few minutes to figure out what should have been blazingly obvious from the start: there was NO conflict. None, whatsoever. Attractive girl and attractive guy meet and are attracted to each other. They hook up. The end.

Gaack!!!!!!!! How did I miss that while writing and editing almost 7000 words? Now, do I go back and torture them? Throw in a time bomb and a runaway freight train? Give one of them amnesia or sudden desire for a sex change operation?

Now *I* have conflict. It's a Christmas story, so I have plenty of time to revise it. Yet part of me just wants to leave it as is and forget about it. I'm tired of looking at it. I could also just put it up on Smashwords as a free download. Yet... that's probably not the best idea if I'm trying to build readership. The other option is to forget it completely and pretend it never existed.

Sigh...

I'm also in the middle of trying to pack up my place to be ready to move by the end of next month, which means I really have to be ready by the end of this month, since I have to give my landlady notice and she'll want to bring people through. I really don't have time to worry about a story with no conflict. I have enough conflict of my own, right? Because I've also been in the process of interviewing for a job in Maine, and they're pretty interested in me right now. And moving across country (again!) is a huge undertaking.

Regardless of where I end up, I still have to move out of my current place so I can afford to pay college tuition for my daughter. And maybe one thing that would help with that tuition might be selling more books... hmm.... I think I see two tortured heroes coming up.

How are you doing? Any editing woes or victories to report?

Shiver me timbers...

For those of you who enjoy a little tingle of fear, let me present Charles Gramlich's "Chimes".

For those of you who may not be familiar with Charles, he's a psychology professor and writer who lives in Louisiana with his equally talented wife--photographer and artist Lana Gramlich. Both of their blogs are worth following. Charles posts thought provoking blogs about writing and has quite a following; Lana's photographs are incredibly beautiful. Apart from that, they're just so darn cute. ;) (And now probably hate me, lol) But seriously, they're so supportive of one another that it always makes me smile to read their comments.

However, this post is about Charles's short thriller, Chimes. I thought this was going to be a horror story, and it was - but more in a Hitchcock horror kind of way. That is, more buildup of mental and emotional tension rather than a string of gory monster scenes.

I've read Charles's work before and one thing that I always take away from them is how deftly he creates a mood using scenery, sounds, and "average Joe" characters to build tension.

In Chimes, the protagonist, a woman, is alone in the house except for her sleeping baby, when she realizes there's an intruder. In one scene, she has to search for a flashlight in the dark and must reach into a closet, not really knowing where the intruder might be hiding.

"She wanted to run. Instead, she forced herself to open the closet and reach in for the Maglite, her skin crawling as the sleeves of raincoats and old sweaters brushed against her hands like the shed husks of monstrous insects."

That made MY skin crawl. And every time I thought I had this all figured out, he'd surprise me with a new twist. All in all, very creepy and enjoyable.

Charles has also written a number of other horror and fantasy fiction novels and short stories, as well as non-fiction work on writing. You can also listen to one of his short horror works, Thief of Eyes, in Sidney Williams podcasts, Fear on Demand. The line from that which hooked me was right from the start:

"She had lips that Satan dreamed of in his long fall to hell."

Loved that. :)

So, have you read anything lately, other than the daily news, which made your skin crawl?