Your Charlie brown tree original story sounds very deja vu, so I think I have read a story along the same lines before.

Your final story sounds very interesting, too, sounds like I would enjoy it.

Hope all is well with you. I’m slowly resurfacing from 3 months of baby! Yes, baby Joni is 3 months old now, so I”m slowly catching up on my email and blog reading.

Ian

I had a fun romp that I kept adding danger elements to. And then I was frustrated with those, because the danger never came of anything. So I amped up the risk, killed a character and the whole tone shifted…well, almost.

Then my problem was I had a story on my hands that couldn’t decide what it wanted to be when it grew up. I had to pick one. Light-hearted short piece with the punch line: tiny aliens (1/2 in. tall) come to Earth to steal drugs for selling to their people for a great profit. The drug, in the end, is for impotency. Or the other way: Dangerous heist on planet Earth, fighting with a grasshopper, one of the three are killed and the other two narrowly escaping the cat.

In the end I went with the latter. But I still want to tell the other one. Can I send them both off if the aliens and world are the same, but the heist goes down differently and I change the title? Sometimes it’s too hard to choose.

Thanks for your great post. :)
Ann

Re: the story.

One of the interesting things about it was that as I was finishing up the story, I couldn’t actually remember what I’d started out writing. The new story had completely swallowed the old one, to the point where the old one didn’t even exist. I kept trying to remember where I’d started, and I just couldn’t. Total blank.

Then, as I was deleting old files on my desktop, I came a across a cuts file, and lo and behold, inside there was the original 6000 words that I’d scrapped. I read it over, and the whole process popped back in. And I could remember all the details of the steps that I’d gone through. It was almost as if I was getting over a case of amnesia, the way the original drafts had been so completely wiped from my memory.