Day Off Story Challenge - Round Two

The challenge - write one complete short story on my day of, once per week, start to finish. Using pre-thought ideas is okay, but not stories that already have more than a cursory word count.

The short of today's post - I was victorious, for the second time in a row. I was off on Wednesday, July 13, and I wrote for approximately six hours. I completed a 3,400 word SF story, entitled "The Day the AI Died". Go me!

The intention of this challenge was to write shorter, easier stories. I seem to have gotten away from this today, even more so than last week, when I banged out a 2,300 word story. My original goal for this challenge was between 1,000 and 2,000 words.

Both stories have been fairly straight-forward, as expected. My
alpha reader felt that the the last story was good, but the ending was too predictable. I have a sneaking feeling this one will have the same reception. Really original fiction may require more processing time than I am giving these.

On the other hand, the first few stories I ever wrote took far longer than these, and are much less interesting too me. So perhaps letting that startling plot twist happen, without spending days or weeks thinking of it, is a learned skill as well.

This story had a slight bit more background than the last one, a text file totalling about 200 words or so. It was also an idea I recorded on a voice recorder while working. It also bore little resemblance to the original concept.

This is not surprising, as I write mostly by discovery, and  none of my stories ever end up where I think they will. I rarely even start with an idea for the ending.

One really exciting fact is that this story is equivalent to about three days worth of daily writing goal word count, and will require very little editing. In practical terms, this is a week's output for me, done in a day. That creative momentum is a really powerful thing.