Albatross!

One of my favorite words is "Albatross".  The first time I heard it was a Monty Python skit where I guy was trying to sell an albatross.  He was walking around with this gigantic "dead" bird yelling, "Albatross!  Allll-batross!"  He sold it to another person who then turned around and tried it sell it himself.  It was one of those things that just stuck in my head.  Every time I encounter writing that I think is ungainly and isn't going anywhere, I think of that skit.

I've used that term to describe an essay that my sister was writing for college.  It was huge, ungainly, and I could tell that she wasn't really interested in writing it.  She took a step back and ended up re-writing a majority of the essay, which turned out to be quite good.  Well, up to this point, I never used that term to describe something I had written.  That was, until I started going through all the feedback I had on Goobasaurus Dex.

It isn't that the people in my reading circle don't like it; it is just that there seems to be a consensus that it isn't where it needs to be.  The feeling of an albatross hanging from my neck is my own.  I feel that it is turning into something huge and ungainly and I need to take a step back and re-evaluate where I want to go and what I want to do with it.  Some radical changes need to be made and it may end up being more than just a simple picture book.  As I told a friend, I felt that maybe I was trying to cram it into a format that it wasn't meant to be.  That would explain why I felt it was turning into an Albatross.

So, the next thing I need to do is take a step back, leave it on the back burner, and let my back brain chew on it while I focus on something else.  I did a little of that with my second story, "Sir Grumpsalot".  With that one, I ended up deleting over half of it and rewriting the ending.  I ended up with a much better story as a result.  Goobasaurus Dex may take more time to figure out than Sir Grumpsalot did.  We'll see.  I've got another story to focus on that I'm really excited about, plus an upcoming creative writing class to focus on.

The story in question is called "The Forgotten Arch" and I am planning on submitting it to a competition through Lulu.com for National Writing Month (which is November).  I have till the end of the month to upload it to their service and enter it.  I don't expect to win anything, but you never know.  I've had a lot of good feedback from everyone in my reading circle so I'm positive that I am going in the right direction.  The last time Lulu.com did a competition for National Writing Month, it was for full length novels and they had 30,000 submissions.  Whether I win anything or not, the important thing is that I am taking the chance.

So, some negatives on one front, but positives on another.

Till next time.