Day one-hundred-twenty-nine, story thirty-four

I finished and submitted my 34th short story of the year a few minutes ago. It's a 3,700-word bit of crime fiction about two college boys and what happens to them during spring break.

Last week I saw the call for submissions for an anthology and wondered if I could come up with something appropriate. I made multiple false starts. Then on Wednesday I found a file on my computer from March 11 of last year, an opening scene of less than two hundred words. The characters were all wrong but the setting and basic events depicted in those <200 words had potential. I redrafted the opening and started piecing the story together, not realizing what I had until I had gone through multiple drafts. Unlike most of my stories, I wasn't sure what this one was about, where it was going, or how it was going to get there until I had a near-complete, but quit sloppy draft. Then I revised, rewrote, and rearranged until I had a story.

And now it's in an editor's hands.