FIRST OF ALL, I guess I should apologize. I had nothing new to say in this WFC. My entry could probably be summed up as "Homecoming" crossed with "Desired" -- arguably my two weakest WFC efforts to date (which raises the question, Do I ever learn? Don't answer that.) I'd like to blame the theme for the "oh no not this story again" thing but obviously, even when the theme is "Death and Rebirth" or "Food," I go to that place anyway. I actually had a nearly completed story along similar lines for WFC6, "Roads," but it sucked, so I chose not to inflict it upon the WFC-reading populace at large (you ungrateful fucks -- kidding!)

So, "Broken Glass." When I saw loneliness was part of the theme I actually tried to think how I could not end up treading over the same territory, so I started with the object instead. The Coke bottle immediately popped into mind, for no particular reason. I thought I ripped it off from an image in clock's unfinished WFC6 entry that I found particularly striking, but it turns out that was rusty beer cans. So I'm not sure where it came from, really, but that's where I started. And wherever I begin, my inclination is always to go backwards, mixing the thematic loneliness with nostalgia. (Is someone remembering something? It must be a Kellnerin story!)

The formula for Melissa (who is thisclose to being one of ana's characters -- and in fact was at one point named Maria -- only Melissa died, which happens to so many of my characters, and to hardly any of ana's) is something like the intersection of bottle and nostalgia plus the word "fiber." It (the word) reminded me of a friend of mine who worked for a company that (among other things) developed synthetic textiles, and from whom I stole the line "I just wanted to integrate, and now all I'm doing is disintegrating."

Somewhere during the course of working on the story Emily appeared, and I'm grateful to her (in the way that some writers occasionally have neurotic feelings of gratitude, frustration, love, or anger for their characters) for tipping the balance of the story a little, away from what could have been all-out wallowing on the part of Keith. (Imagine Keith being alone when he finds the glass, and think about how much less you'd probably have liked that story.) I should have treated her better, made her more of a person than a prop or plot point -- maybe, given the chance, she could have rescued that badly told-not-shown section in the middle, between Keith and Melissa's meeting and the bar scene. Sorry, Emily, I'll try to do better by you next time.

I had in mind that Keith was this sort of dreamy guy (a fucking idiot, suspects bo -- which may well be true, though I contend he's a well-intentioned fucking idiot. It's also true that I'm in love with my imagery, btw, though I think at times the execution is a little sea-glass rough, not inside-of-bottle polished.) Anyway, Keith -- I imagine him as someone whose mind has a tendency to stray from reality, hence Melissa's voice in the opening section when she's not actually there. This was spelled out more clearly in an earlier draft, but it sounded clunky and I got the urge to be too clever for my own good, and I replaced it with some indirection that was probably a little too indirect.

When I started writing, I wasn't entirely sure what had happened to Melissa to make her absent in the present. Then one or two days in October were seriously foggy in the morning as I drove to the train station and, well, I've never been one to pass up a cheap way to kill off a character. Killing off characters is kind of my go-to plot device. Had it been just a few weeks later (that is, if the deadline had been this week), I'd probably have written something about a storm passing through, and the morning after when the roads frost over for the first time.

Anyway, from my own completely unreliable perspective, I thought it worked better than either "Homecoming" or "Desired," though it's still not quite there yet. I'm fine with that too, as long as I have an idea of what's wrong with it (and I think I do). But I'll try not to write this story again, or at least not submit it to a WFC; that'll be my secondary challenge for next time.

I WAS ALSO GOING to include an apology for my continuing inability to put out a WFC book, but now it seems like people are starting to be WFC-ed out. I'll still finish it, since I (and others) have already put a lot of work into it. If even one person is interested I'll count it as worthwhile, and I'm pretty sure the number of people who are not me but are interested is greater than or equal to zero.

I'm not promising anything before the end of the year, though, because November at work is going to suck. My boss even started to take work away from me so that I have an outside chance of accomplishing what I am responsible for without bending space-time or resorting to a risky cloning procedure. (So lovely to be wanted.)

GIVEN THE PREVIOUS PARAGRAPH, I'm not doing NaNo this year. I already kinda miss it, but the not-having-anything-to-say that plagued my WFC entry would be a bigger problem for a NaNo. So, see ya next time, maybe, and good luck to all who are doing it this year. Write an extra 10K for me, OK? (Kidding!)