I expect that I’m about to frustrate a lot of people, but that’s the way it is.
Back in 2007, I started a “Hurricane Katrina” story. I wandered around in my post-apocalyptic Probably New Orleans, got lost, deleted 5,000 words, rewrote it a bazillion times, sent it through my writer’s group several times, and had a friend tell me to give up on the story in exasperation. Another friend kind of felt it was too soon.
Trunk time.
In 2013 I fished it out. It was better than I remembered. Also, it kind of predicted the Occupy movement. I sent it through my writer’s group, sent it to a friend who told me it was a novel, and sent it to my sister. My sister felt that there wasn’t enough voodoo (fixed!), and advised me to fly to New Orleans and soak up atmosphere (appealing, but…).
I sat on it for another three months, but as I am unlikely to add 80,000 words to my 7,250 word story, I decided to send it out instead. So, “The Salvage of Nola City” is now making the rounds.
Chinequa could feel the network congestion, almost like sinus pressure. Too much information. She tried to tune it out so she could concentrate on her job, but she could still feel it, trickling at the edge of her consciousness like a crowd in the distance. It didn’t help that Mr. Libby had the door open so he could load his transport, and the heat and humidity were getting in, nor did it help that she didn’t even know if her sister Keisha was still in the city. She hadn’t seen Keisha since Grandma’s funeral, which hurt, because they’d been inseparable as children. But if she got fired the bank would repossess her neural interface implants, so she needed to think.
