Witching Hour
For this competition, I started with an idea that came from a conversation I had with a fellow writer. If you’ve read the blog posts you have seen me say that I’ve been waking up in the wee hours of the morning and unable to fall back asleep for several years now. Instead of tossing and turning, I use the time creatively, running through the current stories in process, coming up with new ones, working out plots and storylines, character arcs, or refining works in process. These last few months, I’ve been waking up consistently at 3:00 am. My friend commented that 3:00 am is known as the witching hour, which set off alarms and set off my wee hour story plotting on a new quest.
After starting several stories that went nowhere, I couldn’t get excited about any of them, I started over from scratch. Finally, I stumbled over a plot that sounded right. It was somewhat of a paranormal story which is not my usual genre so new territory for me. But I dove in and finally had a story to tell. And for some reason, my friend who first mentioned the witching hour became a main figure. He was a friend to the protagonist at first, but after revisions and rewrites, the character eventually reversed roles and became the antagonist and the reason for the conflict in the story.
With a word cap of about 5000, my first four attempts had gone well past that. I stopped writing at 8000 words and had yet to come close to an ending. I put the story aside hoping it would simmer for a bit. Later, in the middle of the night a week or so later, my eyes snapped open – the ending appeared. Unfortunately, the new ending didn’t bode well for my friend’s character, it was to be the first time I ever killed off the antagonist in a story.
I finished this new version in a rough draft at 8000 words, four days before the deadline. I sent a message to my friend that he’d been saved from a horrible death because I didn’t think I could finish the story in time. He wrote back with some less-than-encouraging words, he said it was a good try. It didn’t make me feel good and I think he was actually baiting me. But even if I wanted to finish, I’d be leaving for a 3-day business trip the next day which would make writing nearly impossible.
Yet something told me not to stop. While on a business trip, whenever I had a few spare moments – while eating a meal, on the plane, or in my hotel room after work, I sat and edited as fast as I could. It took every spare minute I had to get the 8000 words down to 5000 without gutting the story – that was the day before the deadline. I still had to check spelling, grammar, consistency, character voices, etc. – all those things that refine the writing, hold a piece together and make reading enjoyable.
There was one day to finalize the work, all the while attending a full day of meetings, calls, and a business dinner. That night in the hotel room, while my colleagues were at the bar, I felt like a sprinter, racing for the finish line. Normally, I edit a story between five and ten times. My last edit happens if there are only five or six changes from the previous version. After that, I run the story through 3 spell checkers, 1 grammar program, and then have the story read aloud so I can catch misses like ‘from vs form’. There was no way to do all that so I edited up to the last minute, passed it through the grammar program, gave it a Hail Mary last read, and posted the entry with less than an hour to spare.
Thanks so much to Chris for the support, encouragement, and story title.
Winning stories: https://www.bucks.edu/calendarnews/news/news/bucks-county-short-fiction-contest-announces-winners-.html
