Rhino Puzzlings

Astrohaus  recently sponsored their second-annual "flash fiction" Freewrite 500 writing challenge . You might know their name. They're makers of various typewriter-like writing devices  with a high design-y aspect. I don't  need  one, but I've kept my eyes on them for a while. They gave away three models to the top three entrants, in a field of over one thousand. Alas, I didn't place (again, I don't need one ) but I put an entry in. The theme this year was "Haunted" with a hard limit of 500 words. Being a novelist, I'm not used to constraining myself to that tight a limit, and it was a genuine personal challenge to pack as much story as I could into as little space as was allowed. I cut a lot of setup out, and spent a fair amount of time iterating on swapping out words, opening up space in one portion to be able to expand in another. As an exercise, I learned a lot. If they run it again next year, I...

  One Last Quest  is getting questier. I'm still working to keep the shape of the story the same, staying with the original beats but mixing in new motivations, new richness, and new dumb jokes. At its core, this was always a book that amused me to write. I'm still amused by it, though I'm also shocked at the number of typos present, the weird sentence structure, and the plot gaps. To my eyes now, it reads like a first draft that tried. I'm around 75% through the initial re-read and injection pass, and the book has expanded from around 60K to over 100K in wordcount. I think the skeleton is still strong, and I know I've hung some flabbiness from it, but it's still a shock that I've almost doubled the original "finished" work, just by layering in more. I think this is a good lesson for anyone, especially those looking at their finished work and realizing that their aspirations will require another 20-40K at least to meet some wordcount goal. All thos...