One other thought...may or may not be helpful.

But in reviewing one's work, I recommend doing it in a few different ways.

The first is to check the story for continuity.  Does it flow?  Or does it hiccup along the way?

The second is to shift the mind's focus and look at it from a realism standpoint.  Do the characters sound real?  Or the plot?  Are there aspects in there that somehow cheapen things?

The third is to again refocus the brain.  This one's kind of hard.  But you have to ignore the first couple things, and simply read through the work from a purely technical level.  Are there misspellings?  These are easy to overlook when you concentrate on the above two things.  Should you combine or space out paragraphs?  Does something pop more with the use of italics or bold?  Should you use an exclamation point instead of a period?

All of those things.

This is kind of an interesting thought.

Working on finalizing Inbetween and I drew a parallel of writing to sculpting (Note: you'll notice a lot of analogies in my blog.  For me, they're helpful mind exercises to correlate what I'm doing to things I witness in day-to-day life).

But the similarity I found - and I've never been a sculptor so there's some level of speculation here - is that you start with a block of something.  Granite, marble, whatever.  That's your starting point.  Then you start to chisel the granite, or chip away at the marble, until you've roughed in the vision.  Then after contemplating, debating, doubting, and criticizing, you see the extra edges.  The additional materials seemed beneficial earlier, but now take away from the intricacy of what your trying to convey.  Maybe the intimacy?

So you start to trim words.  You start to hone the edges.  You sand, you polish, and you...in general...clean it up.

With that being said...

Inbetween is about ready.

The story is called ‘Inbetween’.  I won’t describe it as my hope with this is for anyone who reads it will go into it with absolutely no idea of what they’re about to dive into.

But my hope for the outcome?  Compelling, of course.  Something that people can let themselves drift into. 

Mostly though…I think what I’m going for is haunting.  Not in the spooky, slasher, don’t-turn-out-the-lights type way.

Something that sticks with people.  Doesn’t quite let go.  Even long after the pages have long since been read.

I’ll post it here once completed.  You can be the judge.

I muddled through that one for about a week.  Then an idea came to me.

Sticking with the athlete motif, I applied that to writing. 

Maybe what I really need is a stretching of the writing muscles.  Not going from 0 to 60 in 3 seconds.  Not jumping back into a playoff game from a long time on the bench.  But rather…taking a few laps on a smaller field.  Not developing an intricate plot with sub-plots and twists and conflicts around every corner.

Just some warm-up drills.

A short story.

I’ll try that.

You hear the term “writer’s block” frequently in writing circles.  For me, it’s not quite like that.  I have the ideas about plots, characters, what they’ll look like, what they’ll say, where the conflicts will arise, and so forth.

Although when I started penning those ideas, the sentences don’t necessarily get stuck between brain and keyboard, but they come out…um, clunky?  Not smoothly. Something like that…

The best analogy I could think of was a wide receiver on a football team who’d been out of the game for a year.  And not actively practicing.  His first time back on the field he still made it down field, but his steps weren’t as quick.  He wasn’t as graceful.  He’d lost his edge.  He was…clunky.  Maybe that was the right word after all.

Here’s where writing can be particularly challenging when you haven’t done it in awhile.

Let’s say you finally ‘make the time’ and carve out 2, 3, or (if particularly lucky) 4 hours to sit down and pluck away at it.

And then 2, 3, or 4 hours later you lean back in disgust, look at the words and shake your head.  Thinking maybe you’re just too close to it at that particular moment.  And if you step away for a day or two you’ll come back and see some beauty in the paragraphs.  And then you do.  And then you realize there still isn’t.

One good thing I did with my time?  I got married.  Beth…mentioned many times in this blog…and who got a ringside seat to the (sometimes ugly) creation of Denver Nights, jumped in with me in an impromptu ceremony in Las Vegas.

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/apr/19/entertainment/la-et-ct-cinemacon-wedding-20130418