Apocalypse revisited

One of the stories I have to rewrite is a novelette I wrote a couple of years back title "In the Second Year Following Apocalypse." I workshopped it with Slugtribe, and while it got positive responses, it was obvious significant rewriting lay ahead. Which for some reason I simply could not do. Every time I turned to this story, I locked up. Maybe I wasn't ready to revisit it. I dunno.

But today, driving home from work and thinking about interviews and novel projects and various other things, several scenes popped into my head, unbidden and fully formed. Holy moley! These were scenes that went where none existed before, and clarified some existing scenes that needed attention. The long and short of it is that a story already 13,000 words long is likely to be significantly longer, but hopefully better as well.

The important thing is that the words are flowing. That's wonderful, considering how much a struggle writing's been of late. To celebrate, I'm going to share a sampling of tonight's labors:

“Everyone here infected, feraler. We all dying. This shit killing us,” she said, grabbing his sleeve. “Cure me or kill me. It don’t matter. Just make the rot stop.”

Jönis nodded. He thought about the alien spores, focused on the feraler nanobots massing in his bloodstream. Destroy the anomalies. Seek out the different, the foreign, the alien, he thought, praying the chemical signals would be enough to focus the nanobots. That they wouldn’t view her as the anomaly. Sterilize. Purify.

He cupped her breast in one hand, laying his other on her shoulder. Her ruined flesh tore and collapsed under his gentle touch. Horrified, he poured his power into her.

She screamed.

Now Playing: Monks of the Benedictine Abbey el Calcat A Treasury of Gregorian Chants