After not touching it for almost two months, I returned to my short story “One Night in Benevolence” this evening, thinking I’d write a new beginning, alter things a bit in the body and change the ending. Nuh-uh. I completely rewrote the story, making it about 1,000 words longer and only using some chunks of the original. The weird part is that I didn’t get the ending I had decided on, but instead wrote something completely different. And when I got it out I realized that so much of the new stuff I wrote was pointing toward that being the only possible ending … but I didn’t see it coming. I wrote it, reread the last lines and thought, “No, that’s all wrong.” Then all those little things that had seemed insignificant when I threw them in came back to me.
This isn’t the first time that’s happened. To some degree that happens in most of my stories. But this time was just more pronounced. Very werid … but in a good way.
That took up all my time for tonight, so I didn’t get to polish the other story, “New Moon,” like I’d hoped. Still … one new short story and one complete rewrite in less than a week. I don’t think I wrote two new short stories all of last year, and maybe not the year before.
Ack. I’ve been staring at computer screens so much today my vision is getting fuzzy.
Steven E. Wedel 
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