The Third Rule

After a week of floundering and inspiration, I've finished a new short story entitled The Third Rule. I break away from the norm here in two ways: I don't normally write in 1st person, and I don't usually focus on characters so young. At first, it was easy to slip into the early-teen character, but it was difficult to have the P.O.V. character not be the protagonist. And then, I had a sudden burst of inspiration. I don't know where it came from, but I knew it needed a early-teen girl to make my P.O.V. character miserable. So I asked my daughter what her favorite girls' name was, and created some tension.

That did it. The story became about the interaction between the boy and the girl. Simple, right? Well, not quite. But, I think this is some of my best work to date.

It all started at Hatrack. I was babbling in a thread called "Your Favorite Apocalypse" when I coined the phrase Apocalyptic Taco Mix. Another Hatracker-and-LHer, Deb, was inspired to write a short called Meatloaf of the Apocalypse. Another with dual-membership, KayTi, said it would make an interesting trigger for a writing challenge. Hatrack Writers Forum Administrator, Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (AKA: KDW and SWMBO, which is She Who Must Be Obeyed), asked me to make it an official challenge. Since we hadn't had a rewrite challenge in a while, I acquiesced. Initially, two other Hatrackers accepted the challenge--neither of them was KayTi. So, I posted the fact that we had a challenge on the discussion board and Wallah!, we had eleven more challengers.

While this was going on--or just slightly before--I joined a Writers of the Future group. Amazingly, no one else from that group (also at Hatrack) was in the Apocalyptic Taco Mix challenge. I realized, about the time I was fully consumed in Jackie-boy's P.O.V., that I wouldn't have time to come up with another story by the agreed upon due-date. Since my WOTF goal was 5-7000 words, my Apocalyptic Taco Mix challenge would fit nicely. When things work out like they are meant to be, it's awesome! Hopefully, I'll have 9 or 10 critiques before the WOTF group submission. If that's the case, I should have enough info to clean it up enough to have a second edit. Then I'll be way ahead of the game for the December deadline.

Right now my wife (God bless my harshest critic) has it. As soon as she digs into it, I really know I'll have some work to do.