I accomplished half my goals. I'm really pleased with the way “Earthly Tents” shaped up (though I volunteered to have it workshopped again this coming Tuesday, just to be sure), but when I got home for Thanksgiving vacation, I was on vacation.
Thanksgiving break was five days long, Wednesday through Sunday. The week before Thanksgiving break this sounded like mountains of time to spend with my friends and family and to get work done, but Saturday afternoon when I was only beginning my rewrite of “Someone to Watch Over Me,” I wasn’t sure why I hadn’t already churned out several manuscripts fit for The Best American Short Stories.
Maybe it was the tryptophan that got me. Or the last-minute Christmas-tree-selection trip my family took Sunday afternoon. Whatever it was, it left me frantically typing on my laptop scrambling to rewrite my 16 pages of story as my dad drove me back up Sunday.
I finished my new 26-page draft Monday night (or rather Tuesday morning as I finished sometime between midnight and 2 a.m.), and though afterwards I was awfully tired (and still am even as I type this), I was really pleased with the new draft — except for the ridiculously implausible shootout I tacked on to the story to end it.