...will be completed and available for Amazon Kindle (and related apps) tomorrow evening. Look for an announcement here.
Okay, a little something to tease you with: There are many ways to die in a city, at night, during a rainstorm. People get shot. People get stabbed. People get beaten to death. The darkness and the downpour conceal much. Like cats, city dwellers scurry hissing under awnings, into buildings, into cars, anywhere away from the cold water and shoving wind. Lloyd Mayes was no different from most people, at least in that respect. He shivered, like anyone else would, as the deluge soaked through his rumpled suit and chilled him to the bone. He was just another running silhouette in the war between neon and night on a battlefield shrouded by icy raindrops. His lips moved soundlessly as he ran for an awning that perched over Miller’s Hardware. The shuttered storefront offered no light, no warmth. His lips continued to move; out of the rush of the rain, words finally escaped them: “Tried to kill me. Tried to kill me. Sonsabitches. Tried to kill me.” The words, breathed like a monk’s mantra, continued as he stood shivering in the doorway of the darkened hardware store. After a moment, the gusts of wind lost their focus on whipping the freezing rain up 46th street, and Lloyd ventured out from under the awning to run awkwardly on the slick, water-finished sidewalk once more.
The story is taking longer to finish than I'd like. But I've also come to a decision: After the short story is finished, polished and published, I'm going to start work on a screenplay adaptation. I think "46th & Mercury" would make a damn fine teleplay.
How long is a typical short story for you? Last two I wrote wound up right around 13000 - 14000 words.
I tend to stick to Nebula guidelines: Classification Word count Novel over 40,000 words Novella 17,500 to 40,000 words Novelette 7,500 to 17,500 words Short story under 7,500 words Now, my short stories have been known to exceed that word count, occasionally by quite a bit -- but once I hit 7,500 words, I consider the word count satisfied and then just finishing up the story according to the pre-set plot structure determines how much more words will be there.
A few issues with being unnecessarily wordy. For instance- reads easier (to me) as- I'm not sure how to express it other than feeling you're using a lot of unnecessary words and punctuation. Like how you identify Miller's as a hardware store twice or the "battlefield shrouded by icy raindrops". It's a decent rough, but needs some polish for pace.
