Short story

I sent a little story out into the world to swing for itself the other day – how absolutely terrifying! I am now nervously sitting on my hands. The temptation to read through the story again and again bemoaning why I put that, why I chose those words, why-oh-why – I need to somehow delete this story from my mind. But I cannot! It is so new and shiny. We’re still on honeymoon and I’ve sent it packing.

It almost didn’t come to life at all. I had been playing with a blog post idea for a while, patting it around the computer. As it grew flesh and bones, turning into a story, I wondered whether it was good enough to send away somewhere, like maybe a competition. I am very aware of the fact that I have no fiction credits to my name (yet!) - maybe they are not needed, but I can’t help thinking that they help, that it all helps – especially when you are a bit brand new. So I carried on worrying at the story... but thinking it was turning into the wrong story, more of an essay... and then last week came this flash of inspiration about a completely different idea.

This was a fully fledged little story, no swollen blog post, this. So then I played with that instead for a week and got some paragraphs down, and last Friday night went hell for leather and wrote the whole thing before midnight. Saturday morning I hated it, Saturday afternoon I was okay with it, and then Saturday evening good friend C read it through and liked it. Sunday I picked it over and printed it out to read in the garden. Monday I read it on the train. Tuesday I emailed the revised effort to good friend R (who liked it too, hooray) and yesterday I sat in a coffee shop at lunchtime and went over it with a red pen. I even spoke it aloud over my latte and earned myself a few looks of ‘woah, I see mad woman’. And now I have sent it away. Blimey.

It is for a competition, and I won’t know anything about it at all until October, so now I have to forget about it completely. But I feel so fired up! I don’t particularly like the phrase ‘creative juices’ (as eugh, ick) but me river’s a-flowing. EUGH!

Quick question!

If you are writing a short story for a competition that has no minimum word count, would you stress if your story came in at 989 words instead of 1000?

I am really enjoying writing this story, but try as I might I cannot coax it to 1000 words exactly. There is no reason or rule that says it has to be 1000 words, but I feel just wrong not being able to get it on a nice even number. Is this just stupid? Should I keep trying or if I feel the story is perfect at 989 words, should I leave it?

All advice appreciated as I am currently stuck at work using their lovely internet after hours, and won’t go home until I get this story in the bag! So PLEASE help!

EDIT: Am now home. Thank you for the comments! Decided to leave story as is rather than increase words for no reason apart from feeling even rather than odd! As, after all, am often a little odd, come to think of it. *grins*