Beach Holiday – 3 Submitted
The latest anthology contest by Cat & Mouse Press – Beach Holidays – is closed. I gave a complete Revise & Rewrite to Bandstand Dreams, a story about a mega pop star who saves the Christmas Concert in her hometown, without care for her own safety, without a rehearsal or any of the other things her bodyguard insists on. The lead character is named Pamala Stanley – a nod to our favorite performer.
I wrote three others from scratch: “What Owen Forgot to Mention” – a funny tale about an obscure holiday involving kissing people with red hair; “Every Holiday” – about a couple of high school kids who figure out how to invent holidays to get free ice cream and have dad to their homework; and “Alaric Needs Christmas – a tale about a college-age man who returns to the shore as a lifeguard after a borrowing year at home.
Since the rules limit entries to three, I polled my beta readers and took a hard look at the stories again. Even though I want so much to pay a little homage to Pamala Stanley, the other three stories seemed to be better choices for this round. So Pamala goes back to the shelf to wait for the next opportunity to be published.
Which leads me to what’s next. Now that there are no other projects booking my time, it’s time to get back to my goal of self-publishing. The book of short stories currently titled Beach Misses seems to be two or three stories shy. But all the other stories have been completely revised and rewritten and are ready to go. And most probably, there will be one or two stories that are not accepted into the Beach Holidays Anthology, so I might only need to with one or two more. All of these stories are between 3,000 and 4,500 words so short. I will still need to hire an editor to help flush out the poor grammar, and weak spots and make them the best they can be. Not sure there is enough time but the goal would be to have books on hand for summer 2023.
The book called The Cat Who Saved Rehoboth, is also in need of a revisit. There are 100,000 words from 6 stories all in rough/first draft. I like what’s down on paper now, but know there needs to be a whole lot of re-writing. There also needs to be one more story to bridge a time gap between the last story and the previous one. that will mean some major cutting in every story – which is a good thing. There’s always too much junk in the rough draft.
Looking at the two projects, Beach Misses has a better chance of making the summer reading date – so that’s what’s up next.
